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Title: Fills a huge void
Review: Most histories of the Gettysburg campaign effectively end on July 3, 1863. At most, a few sentences are added at the end indicating that Lee made his way back to Virginia. Even the sophisticated reader has had little opportunity to learn just what happened after the battle. This book changes all that. In great detail, almost every moment of the retreat to Virginia is described. The author makes great but appropriate reliance on primary sources to provide not just the only but the definitive study of these critical few weeks of the war. The book is generally well written, sometimes vivid. However, the author does spend more time than is necessary listing every pound of corn, every mule, every wagon foraged by Lee's army. This makes several pages of the book a numbing read and this data would have been better left to the appendix. This is, however, a small problem in an otherwise outstanding book. A must read for any serious student of the Civil War.
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