Publisher, Blackstone Audiobooks (January 2009)

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"I cannot begin to tell you how pleased I am with the whole production- the format, of course, and the quality of the sound; but above all with Grover Gardner's performance." --Shelby Foote

"The lucidity of the battle narratives, the vigor of the prose, the strong feeling for the men from generals to privates who did the fighting, are all controlled by a constant sense of how it happened and what it was all about. Foote has the novelist's feeling for character and situation, without losing the historian's scrupulous regard for recorded fact. The Civil War is likely to stand unequalled." --Walter Millis

Here begins one of the most remarkable works of history ever fashioned.

All the great battles are here, of course, from Bull Run through Shiloh, the Seven Days, Second Manassas to Antietam and Perryville in the fall of 1862, but so are the smaller and often equally-important engagements on both land and sea: Ball's Bluff, Fort Donelson, Pea Ridge, Island Ten, New Orleans, Monitor versus Merimac, and Stonewall Jackson's Valley Campaign-to mention only a few.

And perhaps never before have these conflicts been so clearly, so dramatically -and so excitingly-presented. The word "narrative" is the key, not only to this extraordinary book's incandescence, but also to its truth. The story is told entirely from the point of view of the people involved in it. The listener not only learns what was happening in the North and South, on the political, military, diplomatic and home fronts-he lives through the events as if he were there. This is the way it was, in its entirety, as far as Shelby Foote could discover it during years of exhaustive research.