Scott Walker is the pastor of the First Baptist Church in Waco, Texas. His great-great-grandfather was a member of the Fiftyseventh Georgia Infantry which is what this book is all about. Walker holds a doctorate in adult education from the University of Georgia.

Drawing on memoirs and a trove of unpublished letters and diaries, Walker follows the soldiers of the Fifty-seventh as they push far into Unionist Kentucky, starve at the Siege of Vicksburg, guard Union prisoners at the Andersonville stockade, defend Atlanta from Sherman, and more.

All but a few members of the Fifty-seventh lived within a close radius of 80 miles from each other. The book is more than just an account of their military engagements. Relatives and neighbors served and died side by side in the Fiftyseventh. The book is a collective biography and Walker excels at showing how family ties, friendships, and other intimate dynamics played out in wartime settings.

Humane but not sentimental, the history abounds in episodes of real feeling: a starving soldier’s theft of a pie; another’s open confession, in a letter to his wife, that he may desert; a slave’s travails as a camp orderly.

William C. Davis, Director of Programs, Virginia Center for Civil War Studies, Virginia Tech, says of the book, “Hell’s Broke Loose in Georgia is a different sort of creature, a penetrating look at the inner world and lives of men who marched, ate, slept, fought, and died together. Not so much a unit history as a ‘family’ portrait of men bound by the war, Scott Walker’s book offers a glimpse of the personality and inner world of almost all Civil War units, North and South alike.”

The book has 16 maps, including the route of the Fifty-seventh Georgia Regiment; Fifty-seventh Georgia Counties; the Atlanta Campaign; Battle of Peachtree Creek; Battle of Atlanta; Hood’s Tennessee Campaign; and Hood’s Retreat from Tennessee.

In the preface, the author states, “This book is not historical fiction. Rather, it is narrative history, a genre of history that is factual, carefully researched, extensively foot-noted, and based on primary resources yet reads as a well-told story. . .

Although I chronicle the Fiftyseventh Georgia Regiment as well as Mercer’s Brigade, my primary intention is not to develop a regimental history but to relate how one small group of Confederate soldiers struggled to survive and remain sane through the ravages and rigors of the Civil War.”

Hell’s Broke Loose in Georgia is available in the Mary Willis Library.

(Information for this report is taken from publicity material by Stacey Sharer and the University of Georgia Press.)