Of the fact that Shelby Foote's 'Civil War' narratives are five-star works there can be no doubt. Still, what strikes me hardest about the books are all the passions that they stir. The Civil War has been over for a hundred and fifty years. The last veterans of that war died when I was a tiny child. They were the great grandparents of my generation. Few of us ever met any of them. And yet --

I was sitting at an outdoor cafe in Missouri with four faculty members from the university, all of them PhDs in one field or another. The woman across the table was fifty-something years old. She said, conversationally, that she was 'from the Georgia hill country.'

"Oh, tish!" I said with a grin. "There haven't been any hills in Georgia since Sherman went through there."

Ooooops! She rocketed ten feet straight up out of her chair and -- at the top of her rise -- started screeching death and atrocity. I thought she was going swoop down from the sky and assault me physically. Her lady friend had to drag her, kicking and snarling, off the outdoor deck of the restaurant and back to her car before the uproar subsided. My face was surely red.

I mean come on, people! I cop guilty to being foolishly insensitive, but what about her? How long does a thing have to be over before it's finally over for all of us? How many generations removed from events do we have to be before we can joke about what happened?

In a certain town in Iowa, I went to a meeting of a re-enactment club. Once a year they all dress up in uniforms and pretend to be soldiers at Shiloh. Yelling and screaming, they stage mock charges though a cornfield, firing paper wads from black-powder weapons -- I thought -- just to hear the noise and see the smoke.

Silly stuff, what? Well, don't laugh at them because they'll hurt you. I got a lecture during which I was sternly informed that Iowa sent more of her sons to the war, per family, than any other state in the Union. Because of that fact, I was told, descendants of Iowa Civil War veterans have pride of place in front of Civil War veterans' descendants from other Union states, and it's no laughing matter.

Understand none of that matters to me. I never bothered to check on the assertion and so I have no idea if it's true. And if it is or if it isn't true, I say: "So what?"

To characters like the lady from Georgia and the cranks in that re-enactment society, Shelby Foote is certainly a hero. I don't think Foote intended it to work out that way but his books raise their ancestral hackles and so he is stuck with it all the same. It doesn't matter what he writes now or in the future because it is for his Civil War opus that he will be remembered. With publication of his Civil War history, Shelby Foote became the American Edward Gibbon.

I read the first of Foote's three doorstops in 2007. I read the second in 2008. I'm going to read the third one this year because -- even though I know how the war ended -- I want to say I finished the chore. It is good reading, withal. I'd recommend it to anyone who doesn't carry a gun. ( )

A true tour de force, this was the book that gave me an understanding of the shape of the war and of the experiences of the infantry. The slightly archaic language further immersed me in the period and, even though I know the plot, Foote's storytelling gripped me like any novel. ( )

I remember distinctly the way that these three volumes loomed at me from my father's bookcase. There were plenty of books in our house, but these three held pride of place on an otherwise empty shelf. I had a suspicion as a child, and it crystallized as I grew up, that braving Shelby Foote's 3,000-page opus was an important rite of passage for all Southern readers. One-third of the way through the voyage, my opinion is confirmed, and I can assure anyone hesitating at the starting gate that you will not regret the days you spend turning these pages.

Foote writes history the way that the ancients did, by which I mean that for him, history is the story of Great Men. He largely avoids the moralizing of Plutarch and the credulousness of Herodotus, but doesn't stray from the ancients' central tenet that history is about heroes. (If you'd like to know, Foote's narrative style seemed to me most akin to that of Arrian in his Campaigns of Alexander). All of this is to say that Foote's is not an academic history; if you want an academic history, browse the reading list of a graduate seminar on the Civil War. But if what you want is to become conversant in the causes, tactics, strategies, and characters that played a part in the Civil War, you couldn't do much better than to reach for this book.

Foote is a good writer, though perhaps not as good as some other reviewers have said. If anything particular to Foote's style of writing deserves criticism, it would be that he favors antiquated vocabulary and unnecessarily long parenthetical comments; he and the em-dash are well-acquainted. Keep a dictionary handy and be prepared to read some of his more purple passages twice or more if you want to unpack all of the information.

Contentwise, I have only two complaints. First, one comes away from this first volume without a firm grasp on the character of R.E. Lee. Foote lavishes detail on not only the major "textbook" players in the conflict, like Lincoln, Davis, McClellan, Beauregard, Jackson, Sherman, and Grant, but also on another tier of officers whose names you never memorized in high school. The reader comes to know these men quite well. By contrast, the Lee that appears in Foote's history is a cipher: humble, dedicated, and competent, but without even such flaws as would commend him to your heart. There has to be more to the man than appears here, and maybe it comes out in the second and third installments.

Secondly, a general overview of the tactics employed in the Civil War would have been helpful. The reader is often confronted by pitched infantry battles bookended by cavalry skirmishes and artillery bombardments. The first question is why, exactly, battles began and ended in this manner? What were the objectives of these movements? For someone who reads more military history than I do, the answer may be obvious. It was not obvious to me. The second question is what exactly were the cavalry and the artillery doing while the infantry was engaged? With a few notable exceptions, Foote doesn't tell us.

I've worn my Southern heart on my sleeve in writing this review, in recognition that a bias may be perceived in my preference for a Southerner's history of the Civil War. But from what I can see, this is not a biased work. Admittedly, Foote does not spill his ink moralizing on the subject of slavery, expecting, I assume, that his readers would recognize the institution as wicked both ab initio and in terms of the evils and injustices that have been tolerated and have flourished in its wake. I have no friends or neighbors today who wish to live in a world where the South had won, and yet many are proud of the fight that was in their forebears. Shelby Foote was, and I am. But we also acknowledge the heroes of the North, and that in keeping with our deepest principles of liberty and equality, those men must become our heroes as well. And here in the South, I think that perhaps they finally have, and that Shelby Foote deserves the lion's share of the thanks for that. Foote gets it right: that all the heroes, in Blue and in Gray, Tecumseh Sherman as much as Stonewall Jackson, have rightfully become the constellations that fill the Southern sky.

Wonderful narrative on Civil War. The battles are good, but I really enjoy the insight into the people and their lives. Foote paints portraits that are multifaceted with faults and glories. You'll be astounded by the actions and words of say Lincoln, Davis, Lee, or some of the others... a few pages later you will be surprised at how idiotic or contemptuous their actions or words can be.

Very long, but well worth the read. I'll wait a few weeks before tackling v.2. ( )

This was quite a book - #800 large pages of close print -- and it is only Volume one! Very well done, though. As I have been recently captivated by Civil War historical fiction, I finally got up the courage to give Foote's colossal history a try. For an avid fiction reader like myself, this was surprisingly accessible and enjoyable. I, for one, was glad he did not use footnotes and excessive quoting from primary sources -- therefore enabling the reader to hear the author's narrative voice as it told its most compelling story . . .

This of course tells of the beginining of The American Civil War - from secession, to Lincoln's election, to the early battles from the opening salvo at Fort Sumpter up to the prelude of Fredricksburg. Exhaustive detail, including less well known (to me,at least) campaigns involving the Navy, Missouri, and even in New Mexico. Not just military, but political machinations as well - we learn alot about the goings on of both Lincoln and Jefferson Davis and their cabinets. Always well-written, never overly technical allowing for a non-military female like myself to follow, handling simultaneous action deftly -- hard to really criticize.

This is probably really a 5 star work - I deduct one star only because it is a bit out of my comfort zone, it took me a very long time to read, and almost overwhelming detail - I hope I retained the salient points -- It sometimes felt like a wee bit of a task. Despite being impressed and my overall enjoyment, the other two chunky volumes on my shelf still look a bit daunting. ( )