In the original dust jacket. Grey board binding with gilt title on the spine.

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Selected by the Modern Library as one of the 100 best nonfiction books of all time

This is a quality copy of the second volume of the three published.

A stunning literary and historical achievement, the three volumes of Shelby Foote s The Civil War vividly bring to life the four years of torment and strife that altered American life forever. 

Description of all three volumes: Taking the reader from the drama of Jefferson Davis’ resignation from the United States Senate and Abraham Lincoln’s arrival in the nation’s capital to Davis’ final flight and capture and Lincoln’s tragic death, Foote covers his subject with astonishing depth and scope. Every battle, every general, and every statesman has its place in this monumental narrative, told in lively prose that captures the sights, smells, and sounds of the conflict. Never before have the great battles and personalities of the Civil War been so excitingly presented, and never before has the story been told so completely.

With a novelist’s gift for narrative and a historian’s commitment to research, Shelby Foote’s epic retelling is the definitive account of the Civil War, a trilogy that has earned a place of honor on the bookshelves of all Americans.

Review: I’m British, and this is hands down the best history of the US civil war that I have read. This is a narrative account of the military progress of the war, including incredibly detailed insights into the main figures involved as well as huge amounts of anecdotal information about the officers and men on both sides. Highly readable, I couldn’t put it down!

Please note, this is not a social or political history of the reasons for war, beyond the essential facts of secession and the abolition movement. It is primarily a military narrative that paints detailed and convincing portraits of the key participants in the war, their manoeuvres and materiel, and the occasions on which they met in battle and butchered each other.

There has been some (somewhat justified) criticism of the work as it does not talk about – for instance – important black figures of the abolition movement: a correct observation, but the book is not about abolition, it’s about war – don’t expect long discussions about the ‘right to secede’ or the ‘moral duty to abolish slavery’ by force of war.

This is a book about the war itself; an account of the many thousands of 19th century Americans who took up arms and slaughtered each other in unprecedented numbers. If you are looking for a detailed political and social history of the era regarding slavery and the progress of the abolition movement; the rights and wrongs of secession (or federal force); or an account of the war in the context of contemporary discussions about white supremacy in the US or the roots of ‘systemic racism’ in the transatlantic slave trade – then you will be disappointed. This book does not analyse the reasons for war in order to justify a side, it comes from a long tradition of written history that assumes you have a moral compass of your own and don’t need one spelled out.

However, for a hugely informative and entertaining account of the courage & cowardice, sacrifice & selfishness, benevolence & butchery, moral crusade & madness of this historical example of killing on an industrial scale, then read this book, and re-read it. It is exciting and melancholy, inspiring and depressing: a superb achievement of scholarship and a fantastic read.

Such as it is, I don’t think it will ever be equalled.

Shelby Dade Foote Jr. (November 17, 1916 – June 27, 2005) was an American writer, historian and journalist. Although he primarily viewed himself as a novelist, he is now best known for his authorship of The Civil War: A Narrative, a three-volume history of the American Civil War.

With geographic and cultural roots in the Mississippi Delta, Foote’s life and writing paralleled the radical shift from the agrarian planter system of the Old South to the Civil Rights era of the New South. Foote was little known to the general public until his appearance in Ken Burns’s PBS documentary The Civil War in 1990, where he introduced a generation of Americans to a war that he believed was “central to all our lives”. Foote did all his writing by hand with a nib pen, later transcribing the result into a typewritten copy. While Foote’s work was mostly well-received during his lifetime, it has been criticized by professional historians and academics in the 21st century.