'I have never read a better, more vivid, more understandable account of the savage battling between Grant's and Lee's armies...Foote stays with the human strife and suffering, and unlike most Southern commentators, he does not take sides. In objectivity, in range, in mastery of detail, in beauty of language and feeling for the people involved, this work surpasses anything else on the subject. Written in the tradition of the great historian-artists - Gibbon, Prescott, Napier, Freeman - it stands alongside the work of the best of them.' ~ The New Republic.
