The Blue and The Gray

Surveys the history of the Civil War and its aftermath, and describes the role of technology, medicine, Indians, Black soldiers, mapmaking, and women

With picture books on the Civil War now coming out as relentlessly as Sherman marched to the sea, it is becoming impossible to see the war for all the images. In the National Geographic's evocative juxtaposing of documentary photographs with Sam Abell's stunning recent ones of Civil War sites and memorials, we get a modernist montage of past and present. The hurried, though crisply written, narrative relates well-known events, but the images of the war, several of them previously unpublished, summon powerful feelings about the enduring and mystic chords of memory on war and its costs. A useful fold-out map of battlefield sites invites readers to visit the places to see them for themselves, but the book itself brings us close to the real war. Still, this is less a book for libraries than for ownership by individuals who want to experience the war at their leisure.
- Randall M. Miller, St. Joseph's Univ., Philadelphia
Copyright 1993 Reed Business Information, Inc.