SHELBY FOOTE'S CIVIL WAR TRILOGY REVIEWED BY JOHN CHUCKMAN

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	• The Civil War: A Narrative (3 Vol. Set) Shelby Foote Vintage, 1986 average customer review:based on 138 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

It Really Is A Classic

For me, it's just wonderful to read all the comments about this trilogy. To read a work of this length, you have to either have already had a passion for the subject and/or certainly acquired one through reading it, because, let's face it, to finish the whole thing is an affirmative act of persistence.

I'm a middle-aged man and what I got from reading the 3,000 pages was all too familiar. It's the saga of middle-aged men making the best decisions they could under the circumstances, and thousands and thousands of young men dying as a result.

The catalogue of battlefield skirmishes runs the whole gamut. You've got your well planned, badly executed maneuvers, your poorly planned, well executed movements, your unexpectedly solid and brave commanders, your imbecilic and cowardly commanders. You've got generals who won't budge until everything is "perfect." As in life, they don't last. You've got your "C" students from West Point who turn out to be such kick asses, they end up running the show.

You have armies groping in and around each other in forests, hill country and bad weather, in an age before they was little rapid communication save the telegraph (and that was often cut). You also have armies blowing each other to pieces on open farmland, with obedient generals leading attacks into entrenched enemy positions.

All of this Shelby Foote captures with awesome, horrifying detail. But he doesn't stop there. Reading about the Lincoln and Davis administrations is like reading a primer on office politics, most of which both leaders apparently mastered quite well. You also get a sense of the enormous social changes that happened in the South and North, the growing exhaustion and cynicism in both camps.

Most of all, as in life, you really get the sense of what a near thing the whole enterprise was. In the immediate moment, which Foote captures so well, it really does come down a lot of times to timing and luck, with aggressive movements always tempered by having some escape hatch, in order to fight another day. And as so often happens in our daily lives, skirmishes are usually inconclusive, with each side playing spin doctor.

So what I got ultimately from the experience of reading this epic was a massive national bleeding expertly reduced down to very human terms.

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SHELBY FOOTE'S CIVIL WAR TRILOGY REVIEWED BY JOHN CHUCKMAN

Shelby Foote's trilogy of the American Civil War has been called America's Iliad and Odyssey, and in some ways it is an apt comparison.

The Trojan War certainly held a comparable place for ancient Greeks as America's Civil War holds for contemporary Americans. I've always wondered why this should be so.

I think there are several major reasons. First, the anvil of the Civil War is where America's rise to world power is hammered out. Lincoln, in the long-term view, is less the Patriarch who frees slaves than he is the successful Corporate Lawyer who forges the nation into a feared industrial and military power. The Civil War is revolutionary for America's status, just as the Great War marked the beginning of the decline for Great Britain.

Second, in a country that has never really quite experienced the horrors of war in the modern era (American deaths for example in World War Two were a little more than half of one-percent of the fifty million lives total, and losses in the First War were almost insignificant out of total losses), the Civil War stands as America's time of great sacrifice and bloodshed.

There is also the myth and color around the nature of the Old South, stuff about gentlemen, honor, and manliness. Southerners certainly accepted this dreamy view, at least the small number with money, while the other dirt-poor farmers were bound to them through dread of Blacks and the feared effects of slavery's end. Northerners, too, came to accept the colorful myths, and many still do. Southern culture of course was based on slavery, and it was a brutal culture in many aspects, but America has never really come to grips with slavery in its history, and the myths are appealing.

Mr. Foote collected some wonderful, colorful anecdotes about the daring deeds or marvelous escapes of leading characters in his long narrative. The telling of these tales does remind one of Homer's various intense scenes with leading characters preparing for or engaging in combat. These come like delightful arias in a long opera.

Certainly, Mr. Foote has captured the great panorama of the Civil War, at least in its military aspects. Some might think the three-thousand pages of narrative a bit excessive, but fans of the Civil War and those who like a good yarn that lasts and lasts will greatly enjoy the books.

Comparisons with Homer may be taken too far. Homer was a poet. Shelby Foote's prose are sturdy and workman-like.

Mr. Foote does not deal with all political, social, and economic dimensions of the Civil War, but then that isn't his job, just as it wasn't Homer's.

This raises a possible philosophical criticism of the work. To a certain extent, with the work's color and sweep and bold deeds, Mr. Foote could be charged somewhat with helping to perpetuate the myths of the Old South, but this is not a point I would want to insist on because those who want to fully understand the Civil War must read other books. This one does just what it sets out to do.

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Civil War

What a set of books. I am finishing the first of 3 in the set. Wow, can this man write. His words and discriptions take you there. It's like he is sitting accross from you and telling you the story... Mr. Foote is great. He deserved all the accolades given to him in his lifetime.

Shelby Foote's Civil War

This is a brilliant work. Shelby Foote's recent death leaves a real gap in the knowledge base available on the Civil War.

The Civil War: A Narrative (3 Vol. Set)

The set arrived in very good condition. Thanks

reviews: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, page 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16

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