Phantoms of a Blood-Stained Period: The Complete Civil War Writings of Ambrose Bierce
In calling Stephen Crane and Walt Whitman our poets of the  American Civil War, we unfairly neglect the Ohio-born Bierce,  who, unlike the first two authors, actually fought for the Union  army, at Chicamauga, Missionary Ridge, Bloody Shiloh, and  elsewhere. If the average reader is at all aware of Bierce, it  is probably from a few choice definitions from The Devil's  Dictionary, the phantasmagoric story "An Occurrence at Owl Creek  Bridge," and the author's mysterious disappearance in Mexico in  1913. However, Bierce, whose nastiness toward contemporary  writers and critics came home to roost when his own reputation  had to be decided, deserves to be better known. His war  experience gives the 27 brief war stories in Shadows of Blue &  Gray the ring of authenticity. In a sometimes turgid writing  style (slaves are once described, for example, as "sons and  daughters of Ham"), Bierce depicts a war that is at once  horrifying, pointless, and supernatural the stuff of The  Twilight Zone. The nine pieces in "Memoirs and Chronicles" and  "Reminiscence and Memoria," with which editor Thomsen fittingly  rounds out this volume, are as artful as the fictions.  Recommended for all libraries.  Despite the strengths of Thomsen's collection, Phantoms of a  Blood-Stained Period is a superior work, for it includes not  only all of Bierce's short fiction and nonfiction about the  Civil War but a detailed 25-page introduction that is invaluable  in placing Bierce in historical context and thus helping to  explain his stance as a realist about the war and a satirist  about post-Civil War American self-congratulation and heroic  myth-making. Duncan (American history, Univ. of Copenhagen) and  Klooster (English, Hope Coll.) wisely organize Bierce's myriad  stories, memoirs, letters, newspaper columns, and even war poems  around the war's five-year duration. Instead of a curmudgeon who  happened to write war stories, this volume portrays a man who  joined the Union army at age 20, fought in the bloodiest battles  until a Confederate bullet in the head took him out of combat,  and revisited the battlefields and retrieved the experience in  memory until his disappearance. Highly recommended for all  libraries. Charles C. Nash, Cottey Coll., Nevada, MOCopyright 2002 Reed Business Information, Inc.