1

[underscored]General Leonidas Polk, C.S.A., The Fighting Bishop.[end underscore] By Joseph H. Parks.
(Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press. 1962. Pp 395. Illus-
trations, Maps, Critical Essay on Authorities, and Index. $7.50)

"After Alfred the Great," says Barnard's professor Cabell Greet,
"there has lived no man who has achieved such stature in the fields
of religion, of the military, and of education as Leonidas Polk. He was
a bishop of the Episcopal Church, a lietenant-general of the Confederacy,
and the projector of an idea for a university whose comprehensiveness is
still unrealized anywhere in teh world a century after his death."

In his book about this man, Dr. Joseph H.Parks, head of the history
department at the University of Georgia, and summer resident in Winchester,
Tennessee, has emerged as one of the most prolific as well as one of the
most scholarly and lucid of all Tennessee biographers. His three other
major works also deal with men prominent in the history of the sixteenth
state, namely Felix Grundy, John Bell, and Kirby-Smith--all by LSU press.
Parks' [underscore] General Edmund Kirby-Smith [close underscore] won the Sydnor prize at Duke University
for Southern historical writing and has just been re-printed. Parks' [underscore] Polk [close underscore]
is based primarily on the Leonidas Polk papers in the Sewanee archives.
Illustrations in the volume are all portraits and photographs at the
University of the South, of which Polk was briefly the second chancellor.

Dr. Parks uses a fine geneological background to demonstrate that
Polk's decision to study for the ministry was a sharp break with family
tradition. His father William asserted that he was the first colonist
to shed blood south of Lexington in 1776. Leonidas' grandfather, Tomas,