Banners to the Breeze: The Kentucky Campaign, Corinth, and Stones River. By Earl J. Hess. (The University of Nebraska Press, Lincoln and London, 2000. pp. 252. $32.00) Civil War military operations between the Mississippi River and the Appalachian Mountains were perhaps the most decisive campaigns of the conflict. Illinois and other loyal western states contributed vast numbers of men to the struggle to prevent Confederate domination of this vital region. Earl J. Hess's book Banners to the Breeze examines an important phase of the war in the West during the late summer of 1862. Hess's work provides a well-rounded narrative of the origins, personalities, and course of the 1862 western campaigns encompassing the battles of Perryville, Kentucky, Corinth, Mississippi, and Stones River, Tennessee. The book is one of the University of Nebraska Press's planned sixteen volume series Great Campaigns of the Civil War and is an excellent addition to Civil War scholarship. The main premise of Hess's book is that military operations were the fundamental determining factor for the outcome of the war. This was especially true between July 1862 and January 1863 when joint Confederate offensives East and West held the possibility of reversing the string of defeats that had pushed Southern armies out of Kentucky, much of Tennessee, and the Mississippi rail center of Corinth. If the Confederacy could have mounted successful invasions of northern territory, then the glittering possibility of foreign recognition might have been achieved. One of the ways Hess's work succeeds is by his use of excellent topographical and geographical descriptions of each campaign. His explanations of the lay of the land of the western theater and of the battlefields helps one understand the generals' tactical intentions, problems of mobility, as well as concomitant logistical difficulties. Hess also makes shrewd judgments of the leadership, describing the entire Confederate command structure in the West as schizophrenic, and he goes on to aptly sum up the generalship of Earl Van Dom and Sterling Price as artless bumbling. Hess amply credits Confederate General Braxton Bragg for skillfully initiating the autumn invasion of Kentucky and for his excellent disciplinarian and administrative qualities, but contrasts these with his indecisiveness and consistently inept battlefield performances. Union generals Don Carlos Buell and William S. Rosecrans also come in for their share of criticism for command failures and inability to grasp shifts in Washington political realities which radicalized the war's prosecution. Banners to the Breeze provides readers with a concise campaign narrative blended with the concerns and judgments of commanders as well as common soldiers, including the imprint their actions and morale left on their respective homefronts. …