Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #150037 in Books
• Published on: 1985-09-29
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 372 pages

Review
"Everything we have come to expect from Catton: scholarly, judicious, clear and unfailingly interesting."

Synopsis
Contemporary prints, photographs, and documents accompany this penetrating examination of the political, military, and social aspects of the War Between the States.

Customer Reviews

Great Civil War Book
This again is a great Book about the subject "American Civil War". The book contains all the important facts, the reasons of the secession to the beginning of one of the bloodiest and cruelest Wars in the world history. The author does not tell all the difficult stories but the important facts. One disadvantage is that all great battles such as Fredericksburg, Stone River, Gettysburg, Wilderness etc. are not very detailed described. The book shows the emotions of North and South at war and is at the end very moving. If you are interested in the american Civil War or general in military history you have to buy this book. I'm happy to have read it and know now again more of the bloody conflict of 1861-1865.

AN OLD-FASHIONED ONE VOLUME HISTORY
This is categorically NOT a tie-in with Ken Burns' video documentary, as suggested by one of the reviews on this page. Rather it is a short but very prosey, well-written but deeply unfashionable book about the Civil War dating from the early 1960's.

True to its time, it is a simple, stripped-down narrative of the main events of the civil war with few of the factors that make (say) James M. McPherson's "The Battle Cry of Freedom" or Shelby Foote's mammoth Civil War trilogy such rewarding investments: In the former case profound reflection on the moral and cultural dimensions of the war and how it shaped the present; in the latter case, in-depth analysis and evaluation of the personalities involved in the conflict and a florid richness of detail and anecdote supported by a fine military understanding.

Moreover, by modern standards Mr. Catton simply seems patronising. By repeatedly treating the eventual northern victory as a foregone conclusion from the outset he undersells the particularity and fierce cultural authenticity of the ante-bellum south, allows the reader to forget just how close the South came to winning its independence, and fails to explain the continuing and all-pervading sense of separate nationhood that still persists in parts of the Deep South today. In short, he makes it an anodyne story of how the great American democratic experiment survived its greatest challenge. Worse still, to a modern reader he seems to patronise the African-Americans both in his language ("Negroes") and his glancing treatment of the predicament and active role of African Americans in a conflict that became increasingly about them as it progressed.

This is not a truly bad book, just average and rather dated. There is nothing in it (apart from perhaps simple brevity) that "The Battle Cry of Freedom" does not do better.

Great Civil War Book
This again is a very good book about the subject "American Civil War". The advantage of the book is that the author does not tell to much difficult details. This book contains the important facts of the War 1861-1865. From the reasons for the secession to the beginning of one of the most bloodiest and cruelest wars in the world history. If you are interessted in the civil war or generell in military history you have to buy this book. I'm happy to have read it and know now a lot more of this War.