This is a good overview of the subject, and the author goes over things with a good analytical eye. I disagree with the other reviewer, who thinks that he's unfairly easy on the Union soldiers who foraged "liberally" during the latter part of the Civil War. I did notice one shortcoming of the book's central argument: the author went over the motivation for attacking things like houses in retaliation for ambushes and attacks against Union troops, but overlooked the possibility that the troops themselves needed to feel that they were somehow retaliating for being attacked. Burning down a house, even if it had no effect on the Southerners who ambushed them, did serve the purpose of making the Union soldiers think that they were doing *something*.
This is a thesis, reworked as a book. It's sprinkled with footnotes, and written in a scholarly, dry tone. The result is a lot of information, with interesting and well-reasoned arguments stemming from them, written in rather wooden prose that's not very easy to read. I would recommend this book to hard core Civil War buffs who want to know more about the subject, but only to them.
There is definitely useful information here, especially in the portrayal of international legal theory and the evolution of official policy, but I'm not sure how well some of it stands up upon close examination.