Customer Reviews

Civil War: A Narrative (3 Vol. Set)

5 star:		(153)
4 star:		(16)
3 star:		(5)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

I became a "fan" of the Civil War, to the extent any person can become a fan of a war, after watching Ken Burns' excellent series on PBS. I then set out to learn more about the war, and read, over the course of a couple of years, the three volume masterpiece of Shelby Foote. I can state without reservation it was one of the most enriching reading experiences of my life.

In Foote's talented hands, the characters of the conflict, North and South, come alive. He doesn't ignore the war out west, and treats battles such as Vicksburg, Shiloh, New Orleans and countless others with precision and attention.

He has somewhat of a Southerner's slant, but he is not so opinionated as to ignore gallantry by the North, and he rightfully rips Confederates when it is called for. Lincoln comes off much more sympathetically then Jeff Davis in my opinion, and he recounts various blunders by Confederate generals including Ewell's failure to act at Gettysburg, the disappearance of JEB Stuart when Lee needed him most, Joe Johnston's hesitancy and Hood's uncontrolled aggression in Georgia, etc.

Some reviewers here at Amazon criticized his lack of footnotes and a few missed details (ie who got in the last word in a series of letters between Grant and Lee, etc.) Come on, anyone reviewing the bibliography knows that Foote has done his research, I would expect anyone writing a 2800 page chronicle of a 4 year war to get a fact wrong here and there. 135 years after the war, details still pop up in archives and newly discovered letters which make people question prior assumptions. This is no historical novel as some have suggested - he doesn't invent dialogue and guess about the personal lives of characters like the Shaara books - this is history. And if anyone wants a fuller understanding of characters such as Grant, well than read Grant's Autobiography, as I did, and get the complete picture.

Perhaps Foote's trilogy is not for everyone. He leaves out some statistical data favored by historians such as MacPherson, who spent much more time on the events leading up to the war and who attempted to put the conflict in more of a historical context, although quite frankly those are omissions I didn't miss at all. I think for most general readers, who are simply motivated by a desire to learn about the battles, the great personalities, and the heroic struggles of the North and the South fought on soil familiar to all of us, the Foote books are a striking success. I haven't found a better single source of the history of the war, including detailed battle plans, maps, personal histories, etc. Buy the books, and come back to them here and there while readling other material in between. This is not a reading assignment to tackle in a single season. You'll find Foote's writing to be polished, lively, informative but not overwhelming, like coming back to an old storyteller friend.

Perhaps the greatest accolade I heard of Shelby Foote's involvement with the PBS mini-series "The Civil War" was the admiring comment that he seemed to have been there. I feel very much the same way about this epic 3-volume set. McPhearson's "Battle Cry of Freedom" may be the standard one-volume history of the Civil War, and a fine work it is, but it offers nowhere near the feeling of proximity to people and events as does this massive labor of love. Foote is so good at so many of the writer/historian's crafts that combine to make this trilogy essential Civil War reading. His skill at bringing a novelist's eye to this material has already been frequently noted. But he also has a wonderful way of giving a reader the feeling for the terrain on which battles were fought, for the ebb and flow of those battles, for the character of the men involved (and what characters! the proud, obstinante Jeff Davis, the rugged, unwashed Grant, the patrician Lee, the moody, tragic Lincoln--who would dare invent them? Yet Foote brings them, and dozens more, to breathing life). He conveys equally well the movement of troops as he does ideas--not to mention the sights, sounds, smells of the era, be they on the battlefield, in the army camp, or the White House. These are books that I will turn to again and again (I just got done re-reading volume 3), because, like no one else, Shelby Foote not only makes me feel like he was there, but that *I* was too.

I have just completed this almost 3000 page tome on the American Civil War. I am not American but have always found the Civil War fascinating. A while back I finally decided to purchase a book about the Civil War that would read well and also be informative. Well Foote's books certainly are that. It became an obsession with me to get home everday and read on.....it felt as if I was there. This is partly due to the fact that the books read like a novel (probably why it is called a narrative!). I have read critiscms of the book which state that Foote is pro-Confederate and that this is really a Confederate History....well this is nonsense. He handles both sides with equal deft care. His descriptions of the main battles...First Bull Run, Fredricksburg, Vicksburg, Gettysburg, Antietam, Chancellorsville are all excellent and not to mention the rest of the campaigns. My only critiscm if it can be called that is that his second and third book are far better than his first which tended to drag a little but this may be because things started to really heat up in the second and third book as did the War. Altogether an excellent book and kudos to the author. Now I have to find something else to fill the void.....?

Even as an avid reader of US history, I'd read nothing about the Civil War before reading Foote's work. I was frankly intimidated by a topic that plenty of people spend their entire life studying. This spring, I finally tackled the Civil War and I jumped into the deep end by starting with Foote's 3-volume set. I couldn't be happier with my choice.

There is no doubt that this set requires quite a committment of time and energy, but the reward is huge. Foote's attention to detail and narrative style draw you into the Civil War in a way that would be otherwise impossible. You get to know the characters, you feel their frustration and elation along with them, you develop an appreciation of the scale and scope of the struggle for the soldiers and civilians in a terrible time for the United States.

The payoff is that you get to appreciate a few moments as if you were there: I cried when I read the Gettysburg Address, I felt the mutual esteem between Grant and Lee at Appomatox, I was dismayed by Lincoln's assassintation and its impact on the country, I was appalled by the treatment of Jefferson Davis after the war. You couldn't get this from a lesser or shorter account of the Civil War.

If you truly want to get a sense of the Civil War, look no further. This masterwork by Shelby Foote will put you into the War and you will never regret your investment.

Shelby Foote's trilogy is the definitive work on the American Civil War, which was undoubtably the most pivotal event in our nation's history. It is beautifully written; reading all 2800 pages of Foote's work will not only provide you with a detailed knowledge of the Civil War but will also make you a better user of the English language. It brought the people, places, and events of the war to life for me in a way few other books have done.

Many have given the author bad marks for his lack of footnotes and for his pro-Southern leanings. Both of these criticisms are very overstated, however. His bibliographical notes contained all the information I needed to know regarding his sources and offered a refreshing change from those thick history books in which footnotes take up one of every three pages. And while Foote definitely sympathizes with the South, he remains objective and tells the story from both sides (he did not title his books "The War of Northern Aggression", after all). My own Civil War ancestors fought for the North and I'm glad the Union prevailed, but I also have a tough time rooting against the outnumbered and poorly supplied Confederate forces.

The comparisons of Foote's work with historian James McPherson's excellent and highly-recommended _Battle Cry of Freedom_ are misleading. The latter covers the entire Civil War era, not just the war itself. Events prior to the opening shots at Fort Sumter take up about one third of McPherson's book, compared with only fifty pages (of 2800) by Foote. And while McPherson spends about ten pages on the Battle of Gettysburg, Foote fills roughly 120 on the same topic. _Battle Cry_ is more of a scholarly and statistical work. It discusses topics such as the economic development of both the North and the South prior to 1860, the state of medicine during the mid-19th century, the changes in the federal tax system because of the war, and so on. It was never intended to be a substitute for Foote's masterpiece. In his extensive bibliography, McPherson gives Shelby Foote high marks as a historian and praises his three-volume work as the "most graphic epic" of the Civil War's military campaigns.

I've read alot of books about the American Civil War, but have yet to find anything as impressive as these three. They belong in the library of anyone with an interest in U.S. history.

For me, it's just wonderful to read all the comments about this trilogy. To read a work of this length, you have to either have already had a passion for the subject and/or certainly acquired one through reading it, because, let's face it, to finish the whole thing is an affirmative act of persistence.

I'm a middle-aged man and what I got from reading the 3,000 pages was all too familiar. It's the saga of middle-aged men making the best decisions they can under the circumstances, and thousands and thousands of young men dying as a result.

The catalogue of battlefield skirmishes runs the whole gamut. You've got your well planned, badly executed maneuvers, your poorly planned, well executed movements, your unexpectedly solid and brave commanders, your imbecilic and cowardly commanders. You've got generals who won't budge until everything is "perfect." As in life, they don't last. You've got your "C" students from West Point who turn out to be such kick asses, they end up running the show.

You have armies groping in and around each other in forests, hill country and bad weather, in an age before there were few rapid communication technologies save the telegraph (and that was often cut). You also have armies blowing each other to pieces on open farmland, with obedient generals leading attacks into entrenched enemy positions.

All of this Shelby Foote captures with awesome, horrifying detail. But he doesn't stop there. Reading about the Lincoln and Davis administrations is like reading a primer on office politics, most of which both leaders apparently mastered quite well. You also get a sense of the enormous social changes that happened in the South and North, and the growing exhaustion and cynicism in both camps.

Most of all, as in life, you really get the sense of what a near thing the whole enterprise was. In the immediate moment, which Foote captures so well, it really does come down a lot of times to timing and luck, with aggressive movements always tempered by having some escape hatch, in order to fight another day. And as so often happens in our daily lives, skirmishes are usually inconclusive, with each side playing spin doctor.

So what I got ultimately from the experience of reading this epic was a massive national bleeding expertly reduced down to very human terms.

This trilogy represents something unique in Civil War writing - it is neither a simple history nor a piece of fiction. Rather, it is, as titled, a 'narrative history', in that it attempts to take the huge amount of historical detail, vast cast of characters and broad scope of space and time that comprise the American Civil War and turn that mass of disparate particulars into a compelling story. This is not always successful, especially when multiple events were occuring simulaneously and must be related in different chapters, but on the whole this trilogy did more for me than anything else I have ever read in terms of making the Civil War a comprehensible series of interrelated actions and reactions.

Be careful, though. You are looking at almost 2000 pages, and if you let Shelby Foote's voice get into your head as I did, it will take you a LOT longer to read it - though it may be a more interesting experience for all that.

This is one of those pieces of writing that deserves to be read and reread. It will be a permanant part of my library.

I put off reading this for about 6 months because starting a 3 volume set is a significant commitment and I wasn't sure that I wanted to devote that much time to it. But I kept reading about how good it was, so I took a deep breath and started the first volume.

It's not a fast read. This is three large volumes. But it is page after page of relevant and interesting information as it takes you through most of the war. There is no wasted pages, no wasted words.

It is a bit overwhelming, because so much happened and he covers it all. But it all is part of the war and it is all well written. (I add my standard complaint on war history - the maps could be better.)

This is not for everyone. But if you want what happened in the war, all campaigns and battles of significance, how they were fought, and how it all tied together - this is it.

I plan on reading it again one of these days.

Do not be intimidated by the sheer size of these three volumes - Foote's writing style is very easy to digest. Though based wholly on fact (from thousands of memoirs, diaries, notes, documents, interviews, etc.), the story of the entire war is told almost like a fictional novel, though not to the degree of "Killer Angels", for instance. I found myself breezing through the pages, continuing to read so that I could find out what was going to happen next. The level of detail is astounding - though I thought I knew the war pretty well, I have a completely different (and far better) understanding of it now. Foote also does an excellent job in balancing the accounts of the North and the South, their good points and bad points. He also addresses the unbalanced perception that the Civil War was only fought in Virginia - it was not, with many battles large and small happening from Florida to New Mexico to the Bering Strait. If you want to really know the details of the military affairs and political underpinnings of the Civil War, get this series. You will not regret it!

You can imagine the hardships to be ACW buff in Eastern Europe. Well, thanks to the Internet I got the opportunity to purchase books directly and communicate with people with same interests as I.

So, after couple of months of talking and listening and choosing between McPherson's single volume "Battle Cry for Freedom" and Foote's trilogy I decided to go "Full Monty" and keep congratulating myself for picking this book.

In Foote's trilogy there is almost everything person interested in ACW needs. Extensive descriptions of military operations, politics, economy, diplomacy or life style. When I picked the first volume I did not stop reading until I finished the whole trilogy.

The books are easy to read and chapters are logically divided so you can stop reading and resume whenever you like and felt like there wasn't a break at all.

Foote tries to be impartial although he admits that sometimes he lets his natural American symphaty for "underdogs" to take the effect. Nevertheless, Foote has kind words even for most incompetant generals in the conflict.

There are no footnotes in this book but I do not consider this as harmful because I don't like to hold the finger at the end of 800 pages thick book nor am in position to check every source Foote might have used.

My only complaint is that due to a long time Foote spent in writing the trilogy, first volume is not as detailed as third one, so some of the less important campaigns that occured late in the war get more attention than some of the more important that took place during opening years.

This book is for people who are already aware they are interested in ACW, especially the military side of the conflict, who already read a book or two and would like to get a broad picture. After reading that book reader will probaly pick couple of campaigns that are most interesting to him and read books who specialise in particular campaign.

So be "warned", after Foote you'll never get enough reading about ACW.