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This was a fascinating choice of subject and an underexplored topic in American history, and you could clearly see the author's passion for the subject and the volume and depth of work he put in to the reporting.

Outside of Tom White, I felt the various people's characters could have been fleshed out better. I didn't feel like I knew a lot about Mollie's inner life after her section, so it lacked an Osage point of view character. I also would have liked to have known more about William Hale.

The third section is supposed to be the core revelation of the book and the bulk of the new facts the author uncovered, but the way it's written seemed quick and somehow perfunctory.

Overall, a lot of great ingredients were there, but they weren't put together in a compelling way. I look forward to seeing what the movie can do with the same elements.

This is a long and comprehensive history of the Civil War. It makes an excellent first book for people who are interested in the subject and want to get in depth. McPherson does a very good job mixing in strategy and battle descriptions (with a middling amount of depth that worked well for me) with sidebars about other issues like POWs, battlefield medicine, diplomacy with Europe, etc. It gives a clear explanation of the back and forth flow of the war and helped me learn a lot more about US and Confederate internal politics during the war. I got some flashes of personality from the players, but would have appreciated more fleshing out beyond the very top leaders.

It includes a lot of the run-up to the war, but ends abruptly after Appomattox and leaves the Lincoln assassination and reconstruction to other volumes.

The maps weren't very useful in an e-book format.

This was written 35 years ago, so I would be interested to see what current historians think about it and how scholarship has changed.

Pros:

More than perhaps any other author, April Daniels has somehow figured out how to write hand-to-hand combat in a way that's both understandable to me and fun to read. Usually my eyes glaze over for those scenes, but here I could follow it and was excited to see what was next.

Danny continues to be a very sympathetic character, and it was engrossing to read about her struggling with her anger and trauma.

Would love to see the conclusion of the trilogy, but, even if we never get it, we came to a satisfying stopping point.

Cons:

Kinetiq is barely a character. I know they're a nonbinary anarchist and have some kind of light powers, but beyond that we get almost nothing of their background and personality.

There were a lot of subplots going on, and they fit together satisfyingly, but there was maybe one too many for the length of the book. Could have used another 40 or 50 pages to let, e.g., the Karen or the courtroom subplots breathe.

More than anything this is a business biography of Michael Eisner, and no matter the depth of Stewart's access, he remains mysterious throughout. At times it was difficult to tell if people were behaving so bizarrely because that's how top level executives are, or if Michael Eisner is just that odd a person.

Stewart is great at giving senses of each profiled person's personality and juggling a huge cast of characters in a way that keeps everyone relevant.

It was a great idea to make this book about Disney because it anchors complex business intrigue in a company the reader is familiar with and cares about.

Criticism here is that, narratively, the book ends too early and doesn't show the end of Eisner's tenure. You get the climax of the Roy Disney campaign, but not the denouement. It seems like that, in the years since, the author could have added an afterword about the end of Eisner's tenure.

There were a lot of familiar superhero tropes here, but the protagonist was from such an underrepresented perspective that everything felt fresh.

In interviews, Daniels will directly say this is a power fantasy to make trans girls feel strong, and Dreadnought sticks to that mission. However, Daniels resists the temptation to give her hero a perfect transition, and she deals with both fantasy and down to earth versions of realistic struggles.

It's always tricky to create a new superhero continuity from scratch. It's easy to see the fingerprints of Marvel and DC, and difficult not to feel like you're reading the store brand. The most successful attempts, like the Incredibles, stay tightly focused on the central characters. Daniels (mostly) succeeds here, but I'll be interested to see how the world evolves as the focus broadens a bit.

Looking forward to the second book (already in my Kindle) and hope we get the third someday.