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Tragic Years 1860-1865
An unrevised reprint of the Simon & Schuster edition of 1960. Now printed on alkaline paper. Annotation copyright Book News, Inc. Portland, Or.
1108 pages, Paperback
First published March 1, 1992
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January 19, 2026
This is a 50-star book in a five-star world. It’s huge—but it earns its size.
My biggest complaint with military histories has always been the same: I struggle to retain the endless churn of names, dates, and place names—and as someone who’s totally blind, I’m not going to pore over battlefield maps no matter how many colors they have or how magnificently detailed they are. I’m not arguing against maps. They matter. I’m just begging, once in a while, for a Civil War book that tells the story with human faces instead of topographical sketches.
The documents are breathtakingly varied—so varied, in fact, that trying to catalogue them misses the point. A young girl’s journal. A crusty, cynical reporter filing for the hometown paper. Casualty lists. Copies of actual orders. The variety isn’t a gimmick; it’s the whole engine. And the curation is so good that I never once hit an “irrelevant” passage that made me reach for a skip-forward button. They chose well. Every piece mattered.
For the first time I can remember, I read a war history without getting hopelessly bogged down in “who’s on Little Round Top, who’s on Big Round Top, what about that group on Cemetery Ridge…” Instead, I got firsthand accounts that made the war immediate and unmistakably human—reports that capture everything from weather to the eventual stench of gangrenous limbs and the hopeless youth caught in the machinery of it all.
And here’s another reason this is five-stars-plus: there’s no navel-gazing, no academic, elitist, hoity-toity analysis. These editors don’t posture. They find primary source after primary source, and they include it. Maybe it’s true that the victor writes the history, but Angle and Miers make sure the vanquished have a voice, too—and that’s one of the reasons this book matters.
They also avoid the lazy temptations: long speculations on whether Grant was a consummate drunk, or the usual selective outrage that only lands on one side of the war. They don’t minimize the horror of prison camps on either side. Yes, history has hammered us with images of Andersonville—but they unflinchingly hand you word pictures of Camp Douglas near Chicago, and you come away realizing Northern prisons weren’t bastions of bliss. That quest for fairness impressed me, and it deepened my trust in their choices throughout.
Anyone interested in Civil War topics will find this magnificent. If you need four-color interactive battlefield maps with little pins that light up at specific moments (or whatever), those books are out there—and fortunately, this isn’t one of them. Instead of whining to me about how long it is, rejoice with me that the editors divided healthy chapters (about an hour apiece at 1X) into shorter numbered sections. They won’t condescend to you with meandering introductions. They just give you the raw material—material they’ve organized with care, not deliberately trimmed down to force a smooth narrative.
You’ll read about the ebullience of South Carolinians on that fateful December day when the legislature separated the state from the rest of the Union. The editors even give you the text of the resolution they voted on. I’d never read that before, and I found it fascinating. Other chapters show you the suffering of Black Americans under a range of situations, and the sources and writing styles vary so much that you won’t feel bored or feel like you’re revisiting ground you’ve already covered.
I can’t recall reading a more human-oriented Civil War history, and therein lies the reward. I’ve never felt closer to that war than I did while reading this. It’s a time machine—one that gives me as much granularity as I want without drowning me in the kind of pictorial/topographical detail I won’t remember in five minutes. It’s so well curated I can hear the ordnance, feel bullets snatching at my hat or killing my horse, all while I’m thrilled to be safe in my favorite chair.
I’ll read plenty of Civil War books after this, but I’ll measure them against what Angle and Miers pulled off here: maximum human reality, minimum fluff, and a fairness that never blinks.
My biggest complaint with military histories has always been the same: I struggle to retain the endless churn of names, dates, and place names—and as someone who’s totally blind, I’m not going to pore over battlefield maps no matter how many colors they have or how magnificently detailed they are. I’m not arguing against maps. They matter. I’m just begging, once in a while, for a Civil War book that tells the story with human faces instead of topographical sketches.
The documents are breathtakingly varied—so varied, in fact, that trying to catalogue them misses the point. A young girl’s journal. A crusty, cynical reporter filing for the hometown paper. Casualty lists. Copies of actual orders. The variety isn’t a gimmick; it’s the whole engine. And the curation is so good that I never once hit an “irrelevant” passage that made me reach for a skip-forward button. They chose well. Every piece mattered.
For the first time I can remember, I read a war history without getting hopelessly bogged down in “who’s on Little Round Top, who’s on Big Round Top, what about that group on Cemetery Ridge…” Instead, I got firsthand accounts that made the war immediate and unmistakably human—reports that capture everything from weather to the eventual stench of gangrenous limbs and the hopeless youth caught in the machinery of it all.
And here’s another reason this is five-stars-plus: there’s no navel-gazing, no academic, elitist, hoity-toity analysis. These editors don’t posture. They find primary source after primary source, and they include it. Maybe it’s true that the victor writes the history, but Angle and Miers make sure the vanquished have a voice, too—and that’s one of the reasons this book matters.
They also avoid the lazy temptations: long speculations on whether Grant was a consummate drunk, or the usual selective outrage that only lands on one side of the war. They don’t minimize the horror of prison camps on either side. Yes, history has hammered us with images of Andersonville—but they unflinchingly hand you word pictures of Camp Douglas near Chicago, and you come away realizing Northern prisons weren’t bastions of bliss. That quest for fairness impressed me, and it deepened my trust in their choices throughout.
Anyone interested in Civil War topics will find this magnificent. If you need four-color interactive battlefield maps with little pins that light up at specific moments (or whatever), those books are out there—and fortunately, this isn’t one of them. Instead of whining to me about how long it is, rejoice with me that the editors divided healthy chapters (about an hour apiece at 1X) into shorter numbered sections. They won’t condescend to you with meandering introductions. They just give you the raw material—material they’ve organized with care, not deliberately trimmed down to force a smooth narrative.
You’ll read about the ebullience of South Carolinians on that fateful December day when the legislature separated the state from the rest of the Union. The editors even give you the text of the resolution they voted on. I’d never read that before, and I found it fascinating. Other chapters show you the suffering of Black Americans under a range of situations, and the sources and writing styles vary so much that you won’t feel bored or feel like you’re revisiting ground you’ve already covered.
I can’t recall reading a more human-oriented Civil War history, and therein lies the reward. I’ve never felt closer to that war than I did while reading this. It’s a time machine—one that gives me as much granularity as I want without drowning me in the kind of pictorial/topographical detail I won’t remember in five minutes. It’s so well curated I can hear the ordnance, feel bullets snatching at my hat or killing my horse, all while I’m thrilled to be safe in my favorite chair.
I’ll read plenty of Civil War books after this, but I’ll measure them against what Angle and Miers pulled off here: maximum human reality, minimum fluff, and a fairness that never blinks.
Displaying 1 of 1 review