Shelby FooteRecensioni

Kudos on Shelby Foote's attempt at novelizing the Battle of Shiloh during the Civil War. The details were of the individuals actions during battle drew the reader in as did the descriptions of 19th century aspects of southern life. But the book was too flowery when it tried to be descriptive and though it was informative and based on diaries the people who lived it weren't described very well. But the battle was the point. An easy fast read of an omportant battle from a southern historian. Makes me want to visit the site.

A masterpiece of linguistic eloquence and historical meaning by an American Herodotus.

audio book (unabridged). Excellent recounting of the Gettysburg Campaign.

Audio book (unabridged). Very good

Much of what I have to say was in my review for Vol. 2 finished earlier this year. Here is the review:
https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/2876793232?book_show_action=false&from...

Wow. Two of the volumes in one year. Can I finish my challenge of 60 books this year? I have no idea. I don't regret reading this volume. The series by Foote goes into my favorites list of books read for my life. I can't begin to tell you how wonderful a series it is. Was I overwhelmed by the length at times? Yes. I will definitely admit this was a major undertaking, but well worth it. Go t0 your local library, check out the book and read it. The library may have the audiobook on Overdrive (ours does). Each volume is around 50 hours long.

Enjoy reading about the five most important years in the history of the United States. This was the culmination of an issue that was at the foundation of the US, and it is still playing out in our modern lives 155 years later.

I started this series in 1997. I revisited vol. 1 in 2009. I went about reading this volume for a book club challenge to read a BIG BOOK for February 2020. I started in November... and I just finished. I will admit that I read other books during breaks (usually after each chapter/section). Was I bored? No! It is such a BIG BOOK that is a slow read. No skimming here. This series is simply one of the best set of books I have ever read. Here are a few bullets to explain:
* This is a historical narrative. It reads like a novel in places.
* Foote is a master wordsmith. He brings the details forward to bring the reader into the story for the big picture as well as the individual level.
* The books primarily cover the military actions, but include so much more. Politics, historical setting on both the North and South, psychological struggles of individuals, and so much more are interweaved to tell the story.
* While the major figures of both the North and South are covered, Foote also tells stories of so many people that only play minor footnotes in the history of America. It was these "minor" characters that really drew me in at times. Just one or two pages about an individual soldier could grasp your mind and imagination, forcing you to stop and think about that one individual. This is one reason the book takes so long to read.
* I listened to the Blackstone Audiobook while reading. At times, I listened at 1.20 speed while reading the text. I have never done this consistently with another book (listen and read at the same time). With other books, it is simply too frustrating to slow down like that. With this audio book, the audio and reading bring the story even deeper. I know this isn't for everyone, but it worked for me.

Well, now I am challenged with the decision on how long to wait until vol. 3. Will it be 10-11 years? No. I hope to read vol. 3 this year... but I do have 52 books to go for 2020, so I better read some shorter books and get some room for a 3 month dive later in the year.

After receiving Shelby Foote’s Civil War trilogy as a Christmas present some years back, I read the first volume quickly with all good intention of pushing on to the other volumes, but because of the sheer effort and time it took to read one of them, I drug my feet, and only now have gotten around to tackling the second book, titled THE CIVIL WAR VOL. 2: A NARRATIVE: FREDERICKSBURG TO MERIDIAN. My copy comes in at 966 pages, and Foote’s writing style can be most intimidating as his paragraphs tend to run long, like huge bricks of text that take up most of a page, creating the image of a wall the reader has to overcome. But there is a wealth of detail to be found there, and if the reader makes the commitment, they will be well rewarded.

This second volume covers the events from the Fredericksburg campaign through the year of 1863, ending with Grant going east to take on Lee, while Sherman prepares for the campaign in the west which will take the Union forces to Atlanta and beyond. The two high points of the book are the recounting of the Vicksburg campaign on the Mississippi, and the titanic clash at Gettysburg, but in between and before and after, Foote digresses to some little known or discussed side actions in Texas, Florida, Charleston, Arkansas, Kentucky and the Ohio River valley, East Tennessee, and central Mississippi. He gives these seemingly minor clashes ample attention, and makes the case why they mattered and the effect they had on larger campaigns. The Union blunders at Fredericksburg and Chancellorsville are well recounted, along with the Union route at Chickamauga, later redeemed by the Confederate thrashing at Chattanooga. Along the way we get a thorough feeling for the men on both sides, commanders and infantrymen alike, who shouldered the burden of winning the war for their respective sides. Without saying it in so many words, Foote makes the case that the Confederates had the better regimental and divisional commanders in the field, while the Union were often stuck with officers, who, for lack of a better way to put it, simply couldn’t get on the page or grasp an opportunity when it was in front of them. A good example is Meade, who holds a defensive position at Gettysburg and lets Lee’s own mistakes and misjudgments defeat him, and then totally fails to exploit the victory he has won by pursuing his defeated foe on his retreat from Pennsylvania to Virginia. But what the Union did right was to reward commanders who proved themselves on the battlefield, and to quickly dispense with those who failed: Burnside and Hooker were sidelined after defeats at Fredericksburg and Chancellorsville, while Grant and Sherman take Vicksburg and are promoted; George Thomas holds the line against a Confederate breakthrough at Chickamauga and is rewarded with the command of the Army of the Cumberland, while the Confederates allowed John Pemberton, who lost Vicksburg, and Braxton Bragg, who had to flee his HQ on Missionary Ridge lest he be captured by Thomas’ men in a surprise assault, to stay on even after it was clear they were not up to the task. A lot of Confederates spent a lot of time waiting for Joe Johnston and his army to show up, but Foote explains that Johnston, who recognized the limits of the Confederate military, genuinely cared about the men under his command, and was loathe to spill their blood needlessly. And Foote makes the case that Lee should have listened to James Longstreet more than once at Gettysburg. A lot of space is given to some of the war’s most daring cavalry raids and why the Confederacy had a pair of real assets in John Hunt Morgan and Nathan Bedford Forrest, but not so much in William Quantrill. A strong contrast is made between Lincoln and Davis and their respective Presidencies, with the patience and determination of the former, against the lack of support the latter received from his own people, and the impossible situation he was in of leading a nation dedicated to “states rights” in a war for survival, which required cherished principles to be set aside if victory was to be obtained. It is clear that what truly held the Confederacy together against crushing blows, and in the face of defeat, were the grit and guts of their common soldiers in the field regardless of the quality of who was in command. A recounting by a Union officer of finding the barefoot corpse of a Confederate who appeared to be no more than fifteen years old after a battle in Tennessee drives home the cost, and the wasted potential, of the war.

I am staggered by the amount of research it must have taken to produce this book, but I think Foote gave us one of the finest war narratives ever written. Though it took me just short of two months at reading a little more than an hour a day to finish it, I fully understand now why the events of 1863 were the fulcrum of the Civil War, where Confederate hopes for a military victory slipped away irrevocably, and the path to victory for the Union lay ahead if they were willing to do the hard bloody work to get there. This is a book that explains who was who, and what they did when and where; it is a litany of strategies implemented and battle plans made, and often the failures that occurred when first contact with the enemy was made. That is when the real leaders emerged. Foote’s THE CIVIL WAR VOL. 2: A NARRATIVE: FREDERICKSBURG TO MERIDIAN is the ultimate deep dive into that conflict, and a must read for any serious student of American history.

Three volumes, more than one thousand pages, one million five hundred thousand words, twenty years in the making. Not history in the usual sense (i.e., written by historians, for historians), nor a novel. It is a narrative, well-told. One of the essays in the accompanying booklet sums it up well: A flawed masterpiece.
It’s very much a “Battles and Leaders” account, notable for doing justice to other theaters besides Virginia.
Underlying this is a repeated juxtaposition of Jefferson Davis and Abraham Lincoln—this is what first drew me into the book. Before deciding to purchase, I borrowed volume one from the library. By the time I finished the prelude, with its parallel portraits of Davis and Lincoln as war clouds gathered, I knew I wanted my own set. It took a little searching to find out which editions were available; I chose the three-volume Modern Library set with the booklet of essays edited by Jon Meacham. Then I did something I rarely do when I own a printed book (a “real” book): I bought the e-reader version as well, so that I could keep moving forward even while traveling.
Foote’s fascination with contrasting Davis and Lincoln runs like a figured bass counterpoint beneath the long narrative, but it betrays him. The final section, “Lucifer in Starlight,” gives the impression that, in the end, Davis, unrepentant to the last, won simply by surviving nearly a quarter of a century longer than his opponent. It’s reminiscent of Satan in Milton’s Paradise Lost, who steals the spotlight in that book.
After the promising opening to volume one, the book settles into what it advertises itself to be, nothing more: a narrative of a war. But what a narrative! Foote is good at describing the tactical set-ups of each battle he treats. As part of his thorough preparation, he toured each site, often on the anniversary of the fight, with one of the knowledgeable National Park Service guides to lead him. Foote’s skill as a novelist makes him sensitive to landscape and weather, enabling him to sense what the combatants experienced and help the reader see it, too. Even more, he evokes what neither he nor the reader can experience: the hellish fury of booming cannons, clattering muskets, the shriek of the rebel yell, and the moans of the wounded and dying.
Foote’s insistence on covering all the theaters of the war—and from both sides as well—presented him with the challenge of juggling the narrative back and forth and deciding just how much to include of what the two presidents were facing in their respective capitals. Overall, I feel he met this well. A reader less familiar with the names and faces of all the generals might have trouble keeping them straight. However, I still have the multivolume Photographic History of the Civil War that I received as a Christmas present in 1957, the year it was reprinted, which I pored over as a child by the hour. So I was okay. Foote draws these characters with the skill of a novelist. His debt to Homer, who taught him a thing or two about keeping several narrative balls in the air, is also evident in his love of fixed circumlocutions to refer, leitmotif-like, to his characters. To my taste, he overdoes this; he could have omitted a few references to the one-legged Kentucky-born Texan and simply written “Hood.”
The passage of time between commencing and finishing this epic makes itself felt in changes of opinion from one book to the next. In volume one, Foote’s treatment of T. J. Jackson is ambivalent, down to the original application of the nickname “Stonewall” (it was not a compliment). By the time we reach Jackson’s death in volume two, a victim of friendly fire, the tone of Foote’s prose is hagiographic.
Such changes in tone might also be due to passing from documentary sources to secondary. As part of his preparation, Foote read all 128 volumes of War of the Rebellion; he may have been the only one of his generation to do so. This set collects dispatches, orders, and other documents of the time. As such, Foote assigned higher value to it than to the glut of memoirs through which Grant, Johnston, Longstreet, and others refought and reinterpreted the war in subsequent decades. But he supplemented this reading with secondary works. For instance, Strode’s three-volume paean to Jefferson Davis appeared in step with how far Foote was. Its influence may help explain Foote’s treatment of Davis.
One other change in volumes two and three, compared to volume one, is a tendency to write in circles. For instance, the narrative thrice refers to Jubal Early’s troops passing Jackson’s grave. Nor was it illuminating to read after any of a number of battles that it was not the Cannae one general or another had hoped for. It was revealing to read the essay by Bob Loomis, Foote’s editor at Random House, in the accompanying booklet. After the first volume, Loomis decided to dispense with the usual copy-editing, simply marking the manuscript for style. Quite a compliment to an author, but the set would be stronger if Loomis had decided otherwise.
Yet the judgment that this is a “flawed masterpiece” doesn’t rest on such stylistic quibbles. Instead, it’s a reflection of the stance Foote takes. Clearly, he strove to take an even-handed approach; Foote is by no means an apologist for the Southern side. Yet his reluctance to appear to be taking sides means he makes no comment on Davis’s claims that the Confederacy was fighting for honor and liberty. I can believe that Davis was blind to the irony that this “liberty” meant the freedom to enslave millions of fellow humans in perpetuity. But surely Foote sees this. Or does he?
This is even more striking when it comes to one of Foote’s heroes, Nathan Bedford Forrest, whom he famously called one of two geniuses produced by the war (the other was Lincoln). From these pages, the reader has no inkling of Forrest’s post-war infamy with the Ku Klux Klan.
Yet Foote did find room for many anecdotes that his vast reading turned up, to this reader’s delight. My favorite was Breckinridge’s reaction to the bottle of bourbon Sherman produced from his saddlebacks to open the negotiations for the surrender of the Army of Tennessee.
Aside from these vignettes, there was something else new to me. Before reading these volumes, I knew that while some Southern leaders, such as Alexander Stephens, openly admitted they went to war to preserve the institution of slavery, most were less straight-forward, referring to their “way of life” or, closer to the mark, “our Southern system of labor.” Like Jefferson Davis, they cloaked themselves in “honor” and “liberty.”
What I learned, however, was that as the war ground on, one Confederate general, Patrick Cleburne, proposed emancipating the slaves and arming them. That proposal went nowhere, nor did Cleburne’s career after that. Telling was Howell Cobb’s remark: “If slaves will make good soldiers our whole theory of slavery is wrong.”
Foote’s narrative shows there was ample skill and incompetence, nobility, and venality on both sides, although it’s clear that, on balance, the South had a higher proportion of good generals. And the men they led, the common soldiers, punched above their weight. But for what? Like Foote, I descend from men who fought for the Confederacy. Whenever I consider how many sons and grandsons my great (x 3) grandfather lost, I wonder why they fought. Foote quotes one farmer in western North Carolina who summed it up in 1863: “A rich man’s war and a poor man’s fight.”

With this middle volume of a highly detailed three-volume history of the Civil War, Shelby Foote does a meticulous job of documenting every important event (and a few unimportant ones) of the war. And yet, he does justice to every person - well known and obscure alike - to pain a picture of a country torn asunder and how it came to that failure of policy. There is no more complete telling of the scope of the war and I look forward to continuing to Vol 3.

In addition, the narration on the audio edition by Grover Gardner is spot on

With this opening volume of a highly detailed three-volume history of the Civil War, Shelby Foote does a meticulous job of documenting every important event (and a few unimportant ones) of the war. And yet, he does justice to every person - well known and obscure alike - to pain a picture of a country torn asunder and how it came to that failure of policy. There is no more complete telling of the scope of the war and I look forward to continuing to Vol 2.

In addition, the narration on the audio edition by Grover Gardner is spot on.

The best work on the American Civil War. If Foote didn't cover it in these three volumes, it probably wasn't important. Not only do we get the facts, but a very fine narrative. A masterpiece of historical writing.

One of those rare books one can return to over and over. I highlighted a lot of paragraphs. Two great writers and thinkers share their friendship and knowledge. This is a beautiful book and must-read for lovers of literature.

very good book

The correspondents were friends from their teenage years in Greenville, Mississippi and began corresponding in the 1940s: Percy, an award-winning novelist, and Foote a historian of the US Civil War.

Really good book ----- enjoyed it

This is a classic series written by a fine novelist who is sensitive to relating a good story accurately. It makes for great reading such as Will Durant, Arnold Toynbee, or Robert Grant has done for their respective histories.

Which American President created a system for slaves to be judged by a jury of all black jurors? Jefferson Davis

The U.S. Constitution provided for population counting to be 3/5ths of a person for slaves. How did the Confederate Constitution describe African-Americas, in contrast? Slaves.

Which American President created a system for slaves to be judged by a jury of all black jurors? Jefferson Davis

The U.S. Constitution provided for population counting to be 3/5ths of a person for slaves. How did the Confederate Constitution describe African-Americas, in contrast? Slaves.

Which American President created a system for slaves to be judged by a jury of all black jurors? Jefferson Davis

The U.S. Constitution provided for population counting to be 3/5ths of a person for slaves. How did the Confederate Constitution describe African-Americas, in contrast? Slaves.

Good Civil War story.

Shelby Foote, one of the finest Southern voices in recording the history of the Civil War, has written here a series of stories, all taking place in Jordan County, MS, and beginning at the close of World War II and working backward in time. Each is powerful in its own way, and the writing of Shelby Foote is, as always, a wonder to behold.

The opening story, Rain Down Home sees a soldier returning from the battlefield to find the town of Bristol, MS a changed place, and I’m sure, he finds himself a changed man.

The second story, Ride Out is a tale of a homecoming of a different sort. It opens with the setting up of the mobile electric chair for an execution and backtracks to the events that led to that day. It is somber and wrenching.

As if knowing that the human heart can only take so much of sorrow, Foote’s third story, A Marriage Portion is riddled with a bit of humor.

Number four, Child by Fever is long enough to be considered a novella vs. a short story, and has a Faulknerian flavor. It is a discourse on loneliness, isolation and irony, and it leaves you with an empty feeling of helplessness and sorrow. It was also a textbook study in the effective use of irony.

The fifth, The Freedom Kick addresses the newly found freedom of blacks in the post Civil War South. I found this line particularly apt:

They burnt crosses every night all around us, and a man who burns what he prays to, he’ll burn anything.

Pillar of Fire was my favorite of the collection. Perhaps Foote’s voice is the strongest when he addresses the Civil War itself, or perhaps my own affection for the time period, in all its inglorious sadness, affects this. This story stung, the way the blues sting, the way the opening chords of the theme from Gone With the Wind expresses truth and sadness so beautifully that it makes one cry.

The final entry is a tribute to the first displaced people of the area. Long before the Civil War would scar the land, and before the pioneers would settle it, there are the Choctaw. The Sacred Mound fittingly tells us a bit of their story, if it is only the last gasp of their civilization.

Shelby Foote does not disappoint. His writing is hauntingly real...as if he had been there to witness each stage and know each person. He understands the South, and he treats it with love and respect, but without sentiment. If you listen to him closely, the leaves will rustle with the steps of a past that is only just beyond our reach and whispering behind the porticoes.

Told through the eyes of several fictitious soldiers, representing both sides of the conflict, Shiloh reads like non-fiction. Shelby Foote has created the men, but the events and the circumstances are as genuine as they could possibly be, and the major figures of the battle, Johnston, Sherman, Wallace, Forest are there, exactly as they were in life, and the words they say are not put into their mouths but come from first hand accounts and memoirs.

If you can bear it, this is a way to see the battle as it occurred. Foote engages all of your senses, you not only see the battle, you smell it, taste it, feel it, and hear it. It swells around you and shakes the earth you are standing on. No wonder Ken Burns drafted Shelby Foote for his Civil War series, Shelby Foote had already mastered the exact method Burns employed for pulling the viewer/reader onto the battlefield.

At one point I saw a reb and a Union man lying on opposite sides of the road, both in the standard prone position for firing. Their rifles were level and they both had one eye shut. They had the same wound, a neat red hole in the forehead, and they were stone dead, still lying there with the sights lined up--they must have fired at the same time. Looking at them I thought of the terrible urgency they both must have felt in the last half-second before they both pulled trigger.

And, no one understands the South better than Foote. He sees it with love, I believe, but without sentiment.

I remember what my father had said about the South bearing within itself the seeds of defeat, the Confederacy being conceived already moribund. We were sick from an old malady, he said: incurable romanticism and misplaced chivalry, too much Walter Scott and Dumas read too seriously. We were in love with the past, he said; in love with death.

Perhaps this explains why I feel so connected to the Civil War still--after all, I love Scott and Dumas.

**A footnote that makes no difference but gave me delight: one of the men mentioned by name was Burt Tapley of Mississippi. Tapley happens to be a family name, so I wondered if this was just a coincidence, destined to make me feel a bit closer to the action, or if this man was a name gleaned from the record and a possible ancestor who saw the action first hand.

Apart from being a fine Southern gentleman, Shelby Foote is a fine Southern writer. Southern words fit in his mouth, and the flavor of a hot summer night or a relentless day in the fields comes across as something witnessed or experienced and not just something dreamed up in the imagination. Foote is a noted and well-versed historian, and his fiction reads with the same kind of authenticity that his histories have. Follow Me Down is my second Foote novel, and I intend to read his others as I find the time.

Written in 1950, this might be a very early example of courtroom drama. When we are brought into the story, the trial of Luther Eustis has already begun. We know he has brutally murdered a young girl, strangling her, weighing down her body with concrete blocks and leaving her in a pool of water on a small island. What we learn, through alternating points of view, are the events that lead up to the murder and how this murder affects a community of people, including the defendant.

It was an easy story to get swept up into, with strange characters that demanded comparison with both Faulkner and McCullers. The border between sanity and insanity seems to be strained and nebulous, and I asked myself more than once which of these characters was in the least stable. If any point is made here, it is that genetic disposition and the overall harshness of life can warp a soul, even one that wishes to be saved.

I gave some serious thought to the title of this book. I wondered if the place to which we were meant of follow was not hell itself.

For me, Shelby Foote has always been that intrepid Civil War historian that wrote the book on the Southern perspective and contributed so much of importance to the Ken Burn’s mini-series. Now I find that he is also a novelist of some power and skill.

Love in a Dry Season was a 5-star novel to me right up to the last two chapters, when it slid down the scale to a still very respectable 4-stars. Written in the Southern Gothic style that echoes with strains of Faulkner and Tennessee Williams, it looks at Mississippi through the eyes of someone who understands even the quirkiest parts of Southern culture and what sets it apart from any other place on earth. Major Barcroft is shudderingly believable here and inconceivable anywhere else.

Foote gives us the willing victim, self-sacrificing Miss Amanda, who has a strength of character and endurance that is as admirable as it is bewildering; the pitiable Jeff Carruthers, who can be as easily despised as pitied; Jeff’s abominable wife, Amy; and the ultimate con-man around whom they all rotate, Harley Drew. He leads us a dance that is hard to watch, but from which we cannot force ourselves to look away.

The end of this novel was not a bad ending. It was not an illogical ending. It was not even an unjustifiable ending. But, for me it was an unsatisfactory ending. It felt as if the story had built to a crescendo and then someone popped the champagne cork to find the champagne itself was flat, had already fizzed out before it could be sampled. Perhaps I wanted a kind of retributive justice that doesn’t show up all that often in life or in novels. Who knows.

I’m pleased that I was brought to this novel by On The Southern Literary Trail book group. I don’t think I would have come across it on my own. It was time well spent and I would not hesitate to read other novels by this great historian, who obviously knows that history is really just the story of people.

This book from Civil War historian Shelby Foote is pure Southern Gothic delight.

The story centers around 5 main characters, 4 of whom are truly awful people in a fictional town in Mississippi. The story spans across Spanish American war through WWI and into the Jazz Age and follows ill-fated love triangles (is love-quadrangle a thing?).

Loved every minute of this book.

Such a good book, but often spoiled by southern bias of a boring kind. Like I can't necessarily always even believe the narrative- can the south ALWAYS be smarter and braver than the north? also such hatred for the radical republicans- again... does not have the whiff of objectivity.