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Title: Good short work
Review: This is a nice introduction to Civil War history. The author does not take sides which is refreshing since a bias is often evident in Civil war books. Between narratives of movements and battles are several short essays about the cause of the war, the economies of the respective nations, and analysis of military doctrine of the period.The author does a bit of analysis of the key characters and its interesting to see a foreigner's take on the war (Stokesbury is Canadian). One criticism is that the battle descriptions are so short that it is easy to get confused about what took place in the action, and whole complex campaigns can be glossed over. To be fair, this is difficult to avoid in a "short" history of such a protracted war.The writing is good and some of it stands out (the last paragraph of the book gave me goosebumps). This is a good primer on the Civil war and is recommended.
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