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17 of 17 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Truth Ever Elusive, May 29, 2000
Ms. Reardon's wonderful book underscores the challenge that we all face as we read and attempt to separate fact from fiction and fancy.This book is a case study in the mysterious confluence of objective history and subjective history. Ms Reardon deftly takes the reader from July 3, 1863, the day of Pickett's Charge, to the present day and shows how elusive the truth is. As an avid student of the American Civil War in particular and history in general,I learned three very important lessons from Ms Reardon. First, the thundering violence and confusion of battle make the search for the truth exceedingly difficult. The actual participants in Pickett's Charge were able to vividly and tellingly relate their emotions at the time. However, their reports of actual events and actions were understandably contradictory. Second, as Ms Reardon illuminates throughout the book, the careful reader must consider the possible motives of the author while reading the work. Ms Reardon demonstrates that the Virginia Historical Society was more interested in protecting state pride than searching for the truth. The numerous instances of conflicting accounts of this single day of the Civil War reminds me of Richard Nixon's resopnse to the question of how history will judge him : "It depends on who writes the history ". One can call Nixon's response cynical, but Ms Reardon reminds us that the wise reader will posses a healthy skepticism. Finally, when one pores through a Civil War book,or any book on warfare for that matter, the reader must understand that the neat maps of the terrain and the formations belie the utter confusion,terror, and violence inherent in battle. Ms Reardon won me over with her eye for the telling detail when she pointed out that the terrain prevented both Union and Confederate soldiers from a panaromic view of the battlefield.The rolling hills prevented the Union troops from seeing large parts of the charge. Meanwhile, a gentle ridge split the attacking Confederates in half. Ms Reardon ruefully notes that numerous historical accounts from both sides provide intimate details of things that were not visible from the participant's location. Ms Reardon quotes a grizzled veteran who summed it all up when he said,"Picketts Charge has been so grossly exaggerated and misrepresented as to give some color to the oft-repeated axiom that 'history is an agreed-upon lie'."
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22 of 24 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Must reading for anyone really interested in history., November 23, 1997
This book ranks among a tiny handful of works that anyone who really wants to understand history and historical processes, military or otherwise, should read. The title grossly understates the real subject. In concepts and content, this book stands with John Keegan's The Face of Battle, Paul Fussell's The Great War and Modern Memory, Carl Builder's The Masks of War, and Viktor Frankel's Man's Search for Meaning for insights into how individual human minds and groups work, turn isolated events into memory and history, and then have large-scale influences. Even among these, only Fussell and Reardon tie the threads together. With Pickett's Charge as a case study, Carol Reardon's project is two-fold. First she traces how a small, bloody episode in a long, bloody war quickly and irreversibly became attached to and glorified a minor figure in that episode. Second she traces how, in popular memory and myth, that episode came to codify that entire war. In carrying out these two projects, she hits at a complex array of core issues on several levels. For example, she analyzes how soldiers perceive, imbed in memory, privately recall, reprocess, and publicly retell their experiences. What she says of combat veterans applies equally to survivors of many kinds of catastrophe. She shows how the innate human desire to make sense of isolated bits of experience and, thus, achieve meaning in our lives, drives people to impose an artificial order on and attach extraneous material to experience that distorts memory and any record of an event. The elements and dynamics she describes apply equally well to any human experience and to any historical sources and topics. In discussing how the public awareness and interpretation of the events from the Civil War evolved, she describes a process that applies to anything that makes CNN today. In the current climate of interest in national values, her discussion of how the image of George Pickett portrayed through his adherents--most notably, his sycophantic and energetic wife--blended with prevailing Victorian emphases on virtue to magnify his role and the significance of the event. Reardon gives important insights into the well-trodden but currently-important subject of nationalism. Most important is what she says about the process of national formation. The political process she described to find and cement points of agreement on passionately divisive issues is tragically relevant--largely, in the negative--to efforts at peacemaking in many places today, such as Bosnia, the former Soviet states, and the Middle East. Particularly germane to scholars is her insight that, to achieve any immediate political and social goal, most people will eagerly sacrifice accuracy of historical description and analysis. Orwell's dark vision in 1984 of an overarching, totalitarian regime rewriting history and punishing those who try to preserve Truth is far less a real threat than the collective effects of banal, spontaneous, individual daily activities. An extension of the process she describes to other places and times can go a long way toward understanding how in Bosnia, for example, neighbors and even family members readily denounced, turned on, and even brutally murdered one another. The same applies equally well to persistent turbulence in many other trouble spots. Despite its focus on the American Civil War, this book has universal significance and demands reading by anyone genuinely interested in the social sciences. Once finished, a thoughtful reader can expect to feel much wiser but slightly to deeply disturbed. Jim Williams--former director of oral history and lessons learned programs, U.S. Army Military History Institute/Army War College; historian for multinational peacekeeping forces in Bosnia; combat commander; Ph.D. in history and sociology.
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14 of 14 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
An unusual and informative look at the Battle of Gettysburg, January 7, 1998
About 3 years ago, I read the 3 books Gary Gallagher edited that are essay collections on the battle of Gettysburg. While the books dealing with the first and second day had interesting material in them, the one on the third day had a truly interesting essay on Pickett's Charge, by a woman who's a military historian. I'm sure she's sick of hearing it, but female military historians are rather rare, so I read it with some interest. It was worth my time, definitely, and this book is an expansion of the themes presented in the essay. Gettysburg is a controversial subject, and while there has been much ink spilled adding to the controversy, this book instead aims to dissect the controversy surrounding the denoument of the whole event: Pickett's Charge. Reardon first covers the events of the charge very briefly, then wades right in and recounts the memory and history of the event as it developed over the years. There's a whole chapter, for instance, on the efforts of the North Carolina historical societies and veterans' organizations trying to rehabilitate the reputation of Tarheels who fought during Pickett's Charge, because they were blamed (by Virginians in Pickett's division and elsewhere) for the defeat. Watching the history of an event unfold and change as the generations pass is enthralling, and Reardon tells the story skillfully, keeping the pace up nicely and showing a formidable command of publications on the Battle and Pickett's Charge itself... All in all, a truly remarkable book and one well worth reading. A 9 is the highest rating I've given here; and I've rated 10 or 15 books now.
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