Focused on the pivotal year of 1863 the second volume of Shelby Foote s masterful narrative history brings to life the Battle of Gettysburg and Grant s Vicksburg campaign and covers some of the most dramatic and important moments in the Civil War. Includes maps throughout. This then is narrative history--a kind of history that goes back to an older literary tradition.... The writing is superb...one of the historical and literary achievements of our time. --The Washington Post Book World Mr. Foote has an acute sense of the relative importance of events and a novelist s skill in directing the reader s attention to the men and the episodes that will influence the course of the whole war without omitting items which are of momentary interest. His organization of facts could hardly be better. --Atlantic Though the events of this middle year of the Civil War have been recounted hundreds of times they have rarely been re-created with such vigor and such picturesque detail. --The New York Times Book Review The lucidity of the battle narratives the vigor of the prose the strong feeling for the men from generals to privates who did the fighting are all controlled by constant sense of how it happened and what it was all about. Foote has the novelist s feeling for character and situation without losing the historian s scrupulous regard for recorded fact. The Civil War is likely to stand unequaled. --Walter Mills