Customer Reviews

In the Wake of Battle: The Civil War Images of Mathew Brady

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What an valuable tome, Surley one of the most impressive collections of Civil War images ever collected. The introductions to the twenty-one sections are very helpful for appreciating the 400+ haunting Brady photos. I especially enjoyed the Federal Navy section, with photos I had never seen before, although I've read and edited several publications about the Civil War. Included also is a very practical guide to acquiring copies of the photos. In has been ten years since the prolific George Sullivan presented his biography of Mathew Brady. It was worth the wait as we have here an award-winning work that should be in teh history section of every private and public library. Not one of the 450 pages is disappointing.

This is a great book of the U.S. Civil War! The pictures are crisp and clear. It is like stepping back in time, and seeing how the fighting men lived and died during our Nation's Civil War.

This book is just wonderful. Not only beacuse of the photography, but also because of the historical nature of some of these images. I can't recomend it
enough.

A good friend of mine gave me this book for Christmas: it is easily one of the best gifts I've ever received. The book is a thick, little volume, but the photographs are glossy and of the finest quality. The accompanying text is an excellent primer into the field of war photography. I had no idea what a complicated, exhausting process photography was at that time, and appreciation of that fact makes these pictures that much more valuable.

I was also stunned to learn so much about Brady the man, who was kind of a charlatan. He had a habit of passing off photographs he had purchased from competitors as his own, displaying them in his famous studio in Washington. Moreover, the vast majority of these photographs, if not taken by his competitors, were taken by Brady's small army of assistant photographers, whose names have probably already faded into obscurity.

This a real shame considering what a fine job they did. I have spent hours looking over these photographs. The best of them do a rare thing: bring the conflict, with its panoply, its scope, and its carnage, into full focus.

Mathew Brady was called Lincoln's Camera Man, but this photo album is filled with photos from a battery of photographers. It is a nice history in pictures of that time, whoever took them.

These pictures show the devastation of the War. For some reason, though, more of them show dead Confederates. It depicts the war clearly showing some of the multitude killed at Antietam, Gettysburg, the ruins at Harper's Ferry (all places I took my sons to explore a while back). Lincoln is shown at Antietam after the 'bloodiest battle of the Civil War' in October, 1862. Gettysburg, where too many from the South died, occurred in July, 1863.

The pontoon bridges were unusual and clever. The horse and carriages and wagon trains showed how drastically things have changed. Seeing a real ironclad was interesting.

This is a short course in the Civil War for those who want to know what happened; they can see the aspects from a Northerner point of view, as they ravished the South and left parts of it looking like bombed out London or Germany.