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Summary: A mammoth history of the Civil War
Review: I have just completed this almost 3000 page tome on the American Civil War. I am not American but have always found the Civil War fascinating. A while back I finally decided to purchase a book about the Civil War that would read well and also be informative. Well Foote's books certainly are that. It became an obsession with me to get home everday and read on.....it felt as if I was there. This is partly due to the fact that the books read like a novel (probably why it is called a narrative!). I have read critiscms of the book which state that Foote is pro-Confederate and that this is really a Confederate History....well this is nonsense. He handles both sides with equal deft care. His descriptions of the main battles...First Bull Run, Fredricksburg, Vicksburg, Gettysburg, Antietam, Chancellorsville are all excellent and not to mention the rest of the campaigns. My only critiscm if it can be called that is that his second and third book are far better than his first which tended to drag a little but this may be because things started to really heat up in the second and third book as did the War. Altogether an excellent book and kudos to the author. Now I have to find something else to fill the void.....?
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Summary: The Best Single Account of the Confilct
Review: Shelby Foote's narrative stands as the best single account of the Civil War in print. Every great battle, minor skirmish and politcal event is treated in the course of these three volumes. Mr. Foote imparts to the reader a sense of intimate familiarity with the events recounted, as if the reader were now privy to the combined accounts of direct eyewitnesses present at each point of action described. This is a life's labor of research made very readable. Once read, the book remains a delightful work to return to from time to time for a browse. All three volumes belong in every Civil War enthusiast's collection.
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Summary: An Outstanding History
Review: I can't praise this book enough. It combines a good grasp of history with a fascinating narrative style. Although it is probably too long for the casual reader, I strongly recommend this book to anyone interested in the Civil War.
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Summary: Complete Civil War Masterpiece
Review: This book took control of my life. I had to take it with me everywhere I went. I read until wee hours of morning. I read when I woke up. My family thought I was nuts as I read at the dinner table. I couldnt put it down. When I completed it, a hollow feeling sank in. If you are afraid of letting a book take control of your life, don't buy this book. Along with Sajer's "Forgotten Soldier", this is the best book I've read in my 20 years of reading. SO complete. SO easy to read. The generals become your friends. The average soldier your object of pity. As the South's Army dwindles the soldier's inner fire intensfies. The courage of the American fighters exhibited here gave me a sense of pride I never thought I'd feel. A must read.
Rating:
Summary: Great overview of the Civil War
Review: Foote's three-volume set is a great overview of the Civil War. It gives you the personalities and the feel for the times. He has an easy to read style that makes this long work a fairly fast read. The only negative is that covering the full conflict in this manner leaves out much of the details that a more serious reader may want.
Rating:
Summary: A monumental work.
Review: Shelby Foote's trilogy is the definitive work on the American Civil War, which was undoubtably the most pivotal event in our nation's history. It is beautifully written; reading all 2800 pages of Foote's work will not only provide you with a detailed knowledge of the Civil War but will also make you a better user of the English language. It brought the people, places, and events of the war to life for me in a way few other books have done. Many have given the author bad marks for his lack of footnotes and for his pro-Southern leanings. Both of these criticisms are very overstated, however. His bibliographical notes contained all the information I needed to know regarding his sources and offered a refreshing change from those thick history books in which footnotes take up one of every three pages. And while Foote definitely sympathizes with the South, he remains objective and tells the story from both sides (he did not title his books "The War of Northern Aggression", after all). My own Civil War ancestors fought for the North and I'm glad the Union prevailed, but I also have a tough time rooting against the outnumbered and poorly supplied Confederate forces. The comparisons of Foote's work with historian James McPherson's excellent and highly-recommended _Battle Cry of Freedom_ are misleading. The latter covers the entire Civil War era, not just the war itself. Events prior to the opening shots at Fort Sumter take up about one third of McPherson's book, compared with only fifty pages (of 2800) by Foote. And while McPherson spends about ten pages on the Battle of Gettysburg, Foote fills roughly 120 on the same topic. _Battle Cry_ is more of a scholarly and statistical work. It discusses topics such as the economic development of both the North and the South prior to 1860, the state of medicine during the mid-19th century, the changes in the federal tax system because of the war, and so on. It was never intended to be a substitute for Foote's masterpiece. In his extensive bibliography, McPherson gives Shelby Foote high marks as a historian and praises his three-volume work as the "most graphic epic" of the Civil War's military campaigns. I've read alot of books about the American Civil War, but have yet to find anything as impressive as these three. They belong in the library of anyone with an interest in U.S. history.
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Summary: A must for any person with genuine interest in ACW
Review: You can imagine the hardships to be ACW buff in Eastern Europe. Well, thanks to the Internet I got the opportunity to purchase books directly and communicate with people with same interests as I. So, after couple of months of talking and listening and choosing between McPherson's single volume "Battle Cry for Freedom" and Foote's trilogy I decided to go "Full Monty" and keep congratulating myself for picking this book. In Foote's trilogy there is almost everything person interested in ACW needs. Extensive descriptions of military operations, politics, economy, diplomacy or life style. When I picked the first volume I did not stop reading until I finished the whole trilogy. The books are easy to read and chapters are logically divided so you can stop reading and resume whenever you like and felt like there wasn't a break at all. Foote tries to be impartial although he admits that sometimes he lets his natural American symphaty for "underdogs" to take the effect. Nevertheless, Foote has kind words even for most incompetant generals in the conflict. There are no footnotes in this book but I do not consider this as harmful because I don't like to hold the finger at the end of 800 pages thick book nor am in position to check every source Foote might have used. My only complaint is that due to a long time Foote spent in writing the trilogy, first volume is not as detailed as third one, so some of the less important campaigns that occured late in the war get more attention than some of the more important that took place during opening years. This book is for people who are already aware they are interested in ACW, especially the military side of the conflict, who already read a book or two and would like to get a broad picture. After reading that book reader will probaly pick couple of campaigns that are most interesting to him and read books who specialise in particular campaign. So be "warned", after Foote you'll never get enough reading about ACW.
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Summary: These books are not true history
Review: I don't know why some people are so defensive about Shelby Foote's books. One reviewer correctly points out that the books are full of mistakes and are not true history and people respond like protective parents. I suppose if you've labored through them you don't want to feel like your time was a waste. Well, if believing the fairy tale that these are good history books makes you feel better I guess that's fine. But they aren't. The issue isn't whether they are well written or whether the author makes the personalities come alive. The books are beautifully written and he does make personalities come alive, but the question is whether or not the sketches he brings to life are true to history. In most cases they are not. This is based as much on factual errors as on shallow adherence to two-dimensional stereotypes. The personalities Mr. Foote conjures up have great literary appeal (which makes sense since he is a novelist) but they are not true. Real historians try hard to maintain a little objectivity, to avoid drawing conclusions before they begin, but I don't think Mr. Foote did that.
Rating:
Summary: Not Very Good
Review: I agree with the reviewer who rates this work a disappointment. Shelby Foote is not a historian and he doesn't hold a candle to McPherson. Whether he makes the personalities come alive or not is beside the point; the job of history is to reconstruct the personalities as they were, not as a figment of the writer's imagination. Similarly, "scholarly analysis" is not the point. Truth in fact telling is. Foote writes without notes or citations so that his facts can't be checked, the result being that he has passed off often-shoddy research for authority. And the public accepts this as the "centerpiece" of their understanding of the Civil War. Grant, for instance, comes off as an unimaginative (and unwashed, as a previous reviewer writes [Grant had a tub with him during the overland campaign and enjoyed bathing]) general whose chief virtue was pugnacity. As a tiny example, I recently read the section of the third book in the trilogy dealing with the issue of the wounded after Cold Harbor. Not only does Foote terribly misunderstand Grant's personality, portraying Grant as callous and proud, putting his own face ahead of the suffering and the lives of his wounded, but he makes inexcusable errors as well: Foote states that after Grant's famous "I regret that all my efforts...have been rendered nugatory" letter to Lee, that the latter made no reply. This is a glaring error. Lee did reply and in fact got in the last word. In reality, Grant was a humble and terribly sensitive man and continuously fretted over the suffering of the wounded (see Horace Porter's first hand memoir "Campaigning With Grant"). But Foote wouldn't know this because he didn't tackle Grant, one of the two or three most important figures in the war, with objectivity or thoroughness. His "Grant is wonderful" comment on PBS notwithstanding, it is clear that when the books were written Foote did not respect Grant and does not understand him beyond the level of a caricature. It is understandably difficult to acquire a thorough knowledge of all the important players in the Civil War, but Grant? There's really no excuse. Lest one might think this is nitpicking, there are many other similar examples throughout the books (see for example Fort Pillow-Foote's childish hero worship of Forrest allows him to deny the latter's role in the massacre with a [presumably] strait face).
Rating:
Summary: A long, hard trip, but worth it
Review: This trilogy represents something unique in Civil War writing - it is neither a simple history nor a piece of fiction. Rather, it is, as titled, a 'narrative history', in that it attempts to take the huge amount of historical detail, vast cast of characters and broad scope of space and time that comprise the American Civil War and turn that mass of disparate particulars into a compelling story. This is not always successful, especially when multiple events were occuring simulaneously and must be related in different chapters, but on the whole this trilogy did more for me than anything else I have ever read in terms of making the Civil War a comprehensible series of interrelated actions and reactions. Be careful, though. You are looking at almost 2000 pages, and if you let Shelby Foote's voice get into your head as I did, it will take you a LOT longer to read it - though it may be a more interesting experience for all that. This is one of those pieces of writing that deserves to be read and reread. It will be a permanant part of my library.
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