Blue & the Gray

"The American Civil War -- April to April, Sumter to Appomattox, 1861 to 1865 -- pervades the national conscience....It makes a great story...," writes Shelby Foote in his foreword to this volume. "I know of none since the Iliad that rivals it either in drama or in pathos...."

The Blue and The Gray tells that story, the epic of the first great modern conflict. In so doing, it raises issues still of urgent concern in many lands today: What unifies a diverse nation? What justifies the formation of a new one? What sustains democracy and law in the range of the guns? What peace can follow the loss of 600,000 lives?

Six chapters cover the conflict chronologically. Key characters in the saga are examined in biographical sketches throughout the volume, and a picture-and-text portfolio on a major social or technological theme accompanies each chapter. The book features color illustrations by National Geographic photographer Sam Abell and text by Thomas B. Allen, formerly a Society staff editor and a specialist in military studies. A judicious selection of historical photographs, specially commissioned new maps, and maps from the Civil War era enrich the pages.

While tracing the drama of the battlefield, The Blue and The Gray lets the reader meet individuals of the 1860s -- on both sides of the front lines. Their own words, eloquent or earthy, funny or pitiful or noble, express the ideals they lived by and died for as family members fought one another and the war toll became the highest in American history.

With accompanying guidebook and map supplement, this volume is designed to show and explain why, in Robert Penn Warren's words, "The Civil War is, for the American imagination, the great single event in our history," and why, in the opinion of Abraham Lincoln, it would affect "hope to the world for all future time."

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though crisply written, narrative relates well-known events, but the images of the war, several of them previously unpublished, summon powerful feelings about the enduring and mystic chords of memory on war and its costs.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.