Never Call Retreat

My husband received Bruce Catton's American Civil War Trilogy as a gift and he said that he didn't want to see it end. After finishing Volume 3, Never Call Retreat, I agree with him completely. I can understand why it remains so popular almost 50 years from when it was first published. The Civil War trilogy is a scholarly work, but reads more like a novel. Never Call Retreat starts after the Battle of Antietam (Sharpsburg)... Read Full Review

"Never Call Retreat" is the third and final volume of Bruce Catton's classic Centennial History of the Civil War. This volume was published in 1965. Although the details may have been improved upon by later scholarship, "Never Call Retreat" endures as a superb reading experience based on Catton's matchless presentation of history as dramatic literature. Catton picks up the narrative in December of 1862, with the bloody... Read Full Review

Catton's trilogy is excellent at delivering an overview of the Civil War to you. His narrative is descriptive and flowing. He is accurate and provides the general and the anecdotal. Because of the scope of this trilogy, it is necessarily broad. So, you won't get a detailed, blow by blow account of incidents or battle order. What you will get is dynamic, moving history. Your interest for further study will be picqued.

In "Never Call Retreat", the third volume of his Centennial History of the Civil War, Bruce Catton writes of the last two years of that horrendous conflict. As he did in his first two volumes in the Centennial triology, Catton effectively covers the social and political aspects of the war, as well as the military. A work of this scope is, of necessity, a top-down view of the Civil War, focussing on the principal commanders... Read Full Review