Second Manassas to Pocotaligo (SHELBY FOOTE, THE CIVIL WAR, A NARRATIVE)

by Shelby Foote

Book Overview

civil war This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 078350103X
• ISBN13: 9780783501031
• Release Date: January 1999
• Publisher: Time Life Education
• Length: 288 Pages
• Weight: 2.15 lbs.
• Dimensions: 10.5" x 1.3" x 7.5"

Customer Reviews

Excellent Narrative History

This volume brings us nearly to the end of 1862. A great deal of blood has been shed, both sides have launched invasions and been stopped. The Union's top generals have been replaced. The factories of the North are now on a war footing and beginning to produce the overwhelming war maching that no amount of daring, generalship, morale, or toughness will be able to match. Lincoln's preliminary Emancipation Proclamation and English reticence have combined to keep Europe from recognizing the Confederacy thus ending their only realistic long-term hope for success (France was prepared to do so but not alone). Lincoln's December address to Congress reveals him for the first time to his contemporaries as the great rhetorical artist that History remembers. With it he charts the course around which the nation will be able to rally to the bitter end of the war. This is Foote at the peak of his powers as a great narrative historian. In his own words, "Accepting the historian's standards without his paraphernalia, I have employed the novelist's methods without his license." Exactly. The fourth volume in the 14 volume aniversary edition, this completes what was the first of three volumes in the original publication. The illustrations add a great deal, especially the photographs of all of the people that Foote so cleverly describes. However, for a war that ranged over so much territory and depended so much on the tactics of maneuver, it should have better maps. But Foote's geographic descriptions are quite good and I've found that you can follow the action quite closely using the terrain feature on Google maps.