My Brother's Face

Phillips, C.; Axelrod, A.

ISBN 10: 0811801624 / ISBN 13: 9780811801621

Published by Chronicle Books, San Francisco, CA, U.S.A., 1993

About this Item

153 pp, photos. Intimate portraits of the civilians- turned-soldiers in the war that still shakes America. Made real through photos, diaries and letters to loved ones. A first-hand experience!

Seller Inventory # 1501EI

Bibliographic Details

• Title: My Brother's Face
• Publisher: Chronicle Books, San Francisco, CA, U.S.A.
• Publication Date: 1993
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0811801624
• ISBN 13: 9780811801621
• Binding: Soft cover
• Edition: 1st Edition
• Printing: 1st Printing
• Condition: As New
• Seller catalogs:
  • MILITARY
  • AMERICANA
  • HISTORY

About this title

Synopsis

The Civil War. Historians call it the first modern war. Men and boys marched by the thousands and tens of thousands into a conflict that would change the way wars were fought forever. Yet the vast majority of the combatants were neither professional soldiers, nor hired mercenaries. They were citizens - doctors, lawyers, farmers, clerks, and students - who found themselves in an unprecedented kind of combat, brother fighting brother, with the terrible new weapons of the Industrial Age.
If the American Civil War was the first modern war, it was also the first war to be documented extensively with photographs. The old daguerrotype, ambro-type, and tintype processes, awkward and demanding though they were, produced remarkably sharp, beautifully modeled images that reach across the decades with undiminished emotional impact. My Brother's Face is a gallery of eighty unforgettable portraits, each introduced by an illuminating historical commentary and accompanied by passages from revealing letters, diaries, or other firsthand accounts expressing the thoughts and feelings of men, women, and boys far from home and in desperate conflict.
An intimate view of four terrible years that forged our nation, My Brother's Face depicts the Civil War as seen through the eyes of both the famous and the unknown. Here are the faces of those who fought, those who died, and those who healed, all captured in startling, personal images.

Reviews

Authors Phillips and Axelrod, both of whom have written previously about the American West, have mined the lodes of photographic material in the National Archives and the U.S. Military History Institute to produce a powerful evocation of the faces of war. Photography made the Civil War immediate and real to those who lived through it. The poses in these photographs are striking, but the book's overall effect is diminished by its skimpy prose and narrow lens. Rather than placing the images in context, the authors are content to present them mainly as works of art. For a fuller, more meaningful photographic portrait of the war, librarians should turn to William C. Davis's Touched by Fire ( LJ 1/86) and Geoffrey C. Ward's The Civil War ( LJ 9/1/90). My Brother's Face is best laid on a coffee table.
- Randall M. Miller, St. Joseph's Univ., Philadelphia
Copyright 1993 Reed Business Information, Inc.