The letters, diaries, and other information Scott Walker located and utilized on the soldiers and families of the 57th Georgia infantry are among the finest I've ever encountered. He has done complete justice to these superb primary sources by writing a narrative that is richly descriptive yet focused and restrained. Walker allows the soldiers and their families to speak for themselves while placing their words and deeds in a clear and meaningful context.

Civil War regimental histories are thick on the ground now, but 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. This is the part of regimental history that too many regimental historians overlook.

Amidst the fog enveloping the vast array of literature on the American Civil War, much of it mundane and redundant, emerges a real jewel of a book. For in Hell's Broke Loose in Georgia, author Scott Walker breaks free from the usual litany of battles, campaigns, and troop movements and serves up an engaging, tightly woven, account of what the participants felt during the campaigns, rather than how they fought.

A beautifully written narrative . . . Hell's Broke Loose in Georgia stands as a heartfelt recounting of one regiment's triumphs and traumas.

Walker’s book is both a labor of love and an excellent insight into the true nature of military life during the Civil War.

Diligent use of manuscript letters makes this [book] a sturdy soldiers’ chronicle ably set in Western Theater history.

Walker uses this disastrous defeat to criticize the Confederate high command, something he does with stylish effectiveness throughout the book as Southern forces in the West stagger from one debacle to another . . . But Hell’s Broke Loose in Georgia isn't unique because it points out the shortcomings of Hood, Braxton Bragg and Jefferson Davis. It's Walker's passion for his subject, combined with the remarkable correspondence from Confederates to their families, that gives this unit portrait such bold color.

This book is not about glorious victory or honorable defeat; it is about the struggle of men to hold on to their humanity in war’s fiery furnace of inhumanity. This is a book about hell―hell with a few humorous anecdotes, hell with unexpected acts of kindness, but hell.