From Publishers Weekly
The religious dimension of the Civil War gets ungainly treatment in this companion volume (a "must-read for anyone who sees the film," notes director Maxwell) to the Civil War epic Gods and Generals. The contributors, mostly Christian academics and media figures, draw on letters, speeches, prayers and military orders to evoke faith's importance to preachers, politicians, soldiers, slaves and wives during an era steeped in religious feeling and imagery. Organized around profiles of major and minor Civil War figures selected for their piety and their prominence in the film, this illustrated volume tilts in the direction of the generally more devout Confederates. While substantial essays are devoted to Lincoln and to Union poster-boy Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain, the text is weighted toward hagiographies of Southern generals, including the "humble, forgiving" Robert E. Lee and the deeply religious Stonewall Jackson, an "extraordinary man" who "walked among us 130 years ago." And although Confederate efforts to stamp out prostitution, profanity and card playing in army camps are applauded, the Christian piety of slave-owners like Jackson is accepted without much reflection. The lengthy excerpts from Civil War-era writings convey the religiosity of period rhetoric, but the book's reverential tone and lack of historical nuance makes it feel rather like a Sunday School lecture. Color and b&w photos.
Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc.
What with a foreword by Ron Maxwell, director of the new movie
Gods and Generals, it is easy to grasp that this book is a companion to the film, and doubtless seeing the movie and reading Jeff Shaara's novel
Gods and Generals (1996) will enrich appreciation of editors Baehr and Wales' compilation. Still, the copiously illustrated book is independently useful as attestation of the importance of religion in the life of the general society that fought the Civil War and in the lives of many figures prominent in it. Stonewall Jackson is the predominant figure here, because of the novel and film but also because his faith had a burning intensity that daunted even some of his contemporaries. Robert E. Lee, who worshiped duty as much as anything else, is also prominent, as is Abraham Lincoln, a self-construed nonsectarian Christian. Less inevitable figures include William Rosecrans, whose reputation may suffer now as it did then from his devout Catholicism, and George McClellan, who isn't usually considered to have worshiped anything other than himself.
Roland GreenCopyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
