Donnybrook: The Battle of Bull Run, 1861
The Civil War’s first major battle was not especially bloody or decisive, but this fascinating study makes it an apt microcosm of the conflict. Historian Detzer (Allegiance: Fort Sumter, Charleston and the Beginning of the Civil War) provides a lucid narrative of the battle’s course, judiciously assesses the causes and authors of the Union defeat, draws vivid thumbnail sketches of participants from generals to privates, and debunks the "stone wall" legend and other enduring myths of the battle. But the book’s greatest strength is its account of the social, psychological and organizational aspects of warfare in the Civil War epoch. Fought by hastily mobilized amateurs, the battle highlighted the Herculean difficulties the two sides faced in clothing, supplying and feeding large armies and trying to turn fractious civilians into competent soldiers. And Bull Run gave volunteers imbued with romantic jingoism their first taste of the horror, chaos and physical agony of combat. Drawing on a mountain of first-hand accounts, Detzer paints a detailed panorama of every aspect of army life, from the mechanics of working a musket, to the grisliness of battlefield medicine, the scrounging for meals and the suffering through long, waterless marches on a sweltering July day. The result is a splendid portrait of the Civil War as the soldiers knew it. B&w; photos not seen by PW.Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.