Title: The Civil War in Microcosm
Product review: This novel captures the civil war by concentrating on one extended family of Virginia slaveholders and its black "servants". The ante-bellum scenes show the mixture of kindness and cruelty that permeated the master/slave relationship. In the war section of the book (unlike Shaara's The Killer Angels, generals are absent and the battle scenes are written primarilly from the enlisted man's point of view. The confusion and madness of small unit engagements are depicted with a remarkable reality. My only complaint is that the framing story of a WPA interviewer does not ring true.
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