Some good battle histories are crackling accounts of tactical moves and soldiers' memories, stepping along as jauntily as a Sousa march. Through those pages runs a thoroughly readable description of every hour of those three hellish days, in enough detail to satisfy the keenest student of tactics and courage.

It's his expansive, rolling storytelling that makes this book so engrossing and sets Guelzo's Gettysburg apart from the many others. Guelzo's book enlarges the conventional battle narrative. Guelzo's narrative is enlivened by frequent use of accounts by battle participants, observers and Gettysburg civilians, and his descriptions sometimes rise almost to lyricism.' 'This is a masterful battle study, masterfully told. an extraordinarily detailed and realistic account.' Through such scrutiny, one of history's epic battles is given extraordinarily vivid new life. What emerges is a previously untold story of army life in the Civil War: from the personal politics roiling the Union and Confederate officer ranks, to the peculiar character of artillery units.

Guelzo shows us the face, the sights and the sounds of nineteenth-century combat: the stone walls and gunpowder clouds of Pickett's Charge the reason that the Army of Northern Virginia could be smelled before it could be seen the march of thousands of men from the banks of the Rappahannock in Virginia to the Pennsylvania hills. The Battle of Gettysburg has been written about at length and thoroughly dissected in terms of strategic importance, but never before has a book taken readers so close to the experience of the individual soldier. Description Winner of the Guggenheim-Lehrman Prize in Military HistoryĪ Kirkus Reviews Best Nonfiction Book of the Year

Guelzo gettysburg