Twenty-five errors

That’s how many misspellings, typos and left-out words I found in The Longest Nights: General John D. Imboden & The Confederate Retreat From Gettysburg.

It’s a modest piece of short journalism, obviously written to snag some sales during the Civil War Sesquicentennial. It mainly joins lengthy quotes from Imboden’s post-war magazine articles, and quotes from other participants, presumably from their memoirs and diaries, though the brief bibliography doesn’t identify the sources.

The author, Heather K. Michon, is a freelance writer who says at the end of her 27 KB effort for the Kindle that she “is a writer on a mission to prove that history need not be boring.” The price, like so much indie work these days, is 99 cents.

Still, even history that’s not boring needs editing and proofreading to rise above the stereotype of self-published work. Without them, the reader stumbles along, not so much enlightened about a relatively unexamined and interesting incident of the Civil War as he is annoyed, his disbelief firmly grounded.