Books: A Library of 30 Essential Titles

Winners and Losers
Why the South Lost the Civil War Richard E. Beringer, Herman Hattaway, Archer Jones, William N. Still Jr. (University of Georgia Press, $34.95)
Rejects any single cause for defeat, and turns away from economic explanations. Four gifted historians look instead at the relationship between morale and battlefield success.

Why the North Won the Civil War David Donald, editor (Macmillan, $4.95)
Five elegant explanations which give more weight to Southern deficiencies than to Northern strengths in determining the outcome of the war. Historian David Potter suggests that had Abraham Lincoln led the South, and Jefferson Davis the North, the Confederacy would have won.

Social History
The Confederate States of America E. Merton Coulter (Louisiana State University Press, $35)
A first-rate account of the formation and disintegration of the Confederacy, enriched by vivid writing and flawed by its slighting of the slaves and their role in the region.

Social and Industrial Conditions In the North During the Civil War Emerson D. Fite (Corner House, $20)
A magnificent portrait of the booming Northern home front. As the South consumed itself in the effort to supply its armies, the North expanded its output in every major economic category.

Overviews
Battle Cry of Freedom James M. McPherson (Ballantine, $14.95)
A Pulitzer-winning examination of the meaning of freedom and slavery to each warring side. With its pleasing balance of narrative and detail, this single-volume history shoull be unsurpassable for a generation.

The Civil War: A Narrative (3 vols.) Shelby Foote (Random House, $16.95 per vol.; $50 per set)
A complete history, delivered with the narrative power of an adventure novel, and told consistently from the point of view of the combatants. Foote, whose commentary enlivened PBS' recent series, is a master at evoking personalities.

The Civil War: An Illustrated History Geoffrey C. Ward, with Ric Burns and Ken Burns (Knopf, $50)
The well-crafted companion to the 11-hour PBS series on the Civil War. Ward juxtaposes fresh analyses of presidential politics and emancipation with some of the finest reproductions of wartime photographs ever to appear in print. The result is an informative book, lovely to look at and hold.

Aftermath
Rehearsal for Reconstruction Willie Lee Rose (Oxford, $13.95)
An inspired saga of Reconstruction: the story of the betrayal of the freedmen of the South Carolina Sea Islands by their former Union allies. Rose's penetrating study leaves one wistful for what might have been.

Reference
The Civil War Dictionary Mark M. Boatner III (McKay, $25)
An essential single-volume reference work. Thoroughly researched, brilliantly organized, and impeccably written.

Fiction
The Red Badge of Courage Stephen Crane (Bantam, $1.75)
Once criticized for its lack of patriotism and for the self-absorption of its hero, Crane's novel now seems a book that does not grow old. He combines a dazzling palette of words with a keen understanding of inner life as he follows a young soldier from adolescence to manhood.

The Fathers Allen Tate (Ohio University Press, $8.95)
A neglected great novel about the collapse of old Virginia's civilization under the stress of war. Tate never followed up this novel with another — a pity, as any reader of this gilt-edged story will vouch.

Andersonville MacKinley Kantor (New American Library, $4.95)
Pulitzer Prize-winning novel about the death camp known as Andersonville prison, in Georgia. A side of the war obscured by Margaret Mitchell's Gone With the Wind, the national experience of unreason, violence, and preventable disease and death is pressed home in this massive work.