skopia
Faust shows a country improvising the machinery of mass death: embalming, identifying bodies, burying the unknown at federal expense. Six hundred twenty thousand men died between 1861 and 1865, most among strangers.
Three days at Gettysburg from inside the men commanding it: Shaara has Longstreet pleading with Lee not to send infantry across open ground, and Chamberlain, out of ammunition, ordering a bayonet charge downhill.
The standard one-volume Lincoln, and the method is severe: Donald allows him only the information he actually had when he acted. Out of it comes colossal ambition joined to a fatalist's passivity.
Grant crossed the Rapidan in May 1864 and the killing never paused. Catton follows the Union's Army of the Potomac through the Wilderness and Cold Harbor to Appomattox, writing from inside the ranks.
Scarlett O'Hara claws her plantation back through the burning of Atlanta, wanting the wrong man. Mitchell's romance of a gallant South sold thirty million copies and fixed a pastoral memory of slavery.
Dying of throat cancer and ruined by a swindler, Grant set down the Mexican War and the Civil War in short exact sentences that never boast. He finished days before his death.
McPherson carries the whole Civil War in one volume, from the fights over slavery in the 1840s through Antietam to the surrender at Appomattox, and it reads like dispatches filed the same day.