The Civil War: A Narrative

Shelby Foote has created perhaps the most readable, flowing, knowledgeable,researched tomb about the Civil War that I have read. The effort and skill that went into the writing pays off in the reading. The background material imparted in this work makes the reading a pleasure.

This series is a fantastic read. One of the principal attractions for me is that you truly end up feeling like you know the characters- it's not just a litany of facts. Although it hardly needs my recommendation, it has it. I will note that the supposed pro-South bias appears to me to have been very overstated. When Foote does seem to root for the South it's more as an underdog and in the interest of creating a more dramatic narrative.

This trilogy is one of the truly most astonishing literary works. An incredible amount of information has been collected, collated and assembled into absolutely un-put-downable prose. I've read and enjoyed a lot of excellent history works, but nothing so far has risen to level of these three books. The descriptions are so good that you hardly need to refer to the numerous maps, although of course they help and are directly related to and set alongside the relevant text. The political battles of the Civil War are well and fully presented and make for fascinating reading. When finished, you want to start all over.

I needed this volume to have the complete set of Shelby Foote's Civil War trilogy and couldn't find it locally. The condition was as advertised and delivered when promised. These are a great set of books for someone wanting to capture the magnitude of this horrific event in our history. An excellent read!

He has left us with a view of our Civil War, that was never captured before, and has not been since. This volume begins with the horrific carnage at Fredericksburg and the crises in Lincoln's cabinet in the aftermath. As in Vol. 1, Foote transitions smoothly from politics to battlefield, and from the war in the East to the campaigns in the West, and stays highly readable every page of the way.