Brigades of Gettysburg

Gottfried (Roads to Gettysburg) paints a fine-grained portrait of the decisive battle of the Civil War in this exhaustive, engrossing study. In vividly written narratives that draw heavily on first-hand accounts of the fighting, he recounts every brigade's training and prior history in combat, profiles its commanders and chronicles its experiences in the course of the battle. The conflict emerges less as a coherent whole than as a series of small, disjointed brigade-level actions-a perspective close to that of the soldiers, who had no grand overview to help them make sense of the unfolding battle. The result is a human-scale view of the varied experiences of the participants: the grueling marches, the effects of heat and exhaustion, which sometimes felled more soldiers than enemy bullets did, the occasionally prickly relations between officers and men, the tedium and anxiety as soldiers waited to go into action and the panic and elation when they did. Gottfried's treatment has its limitations: it is hard to follow the main ""plot"" of the battle, since no brigade witnessed more than a fragment of it, and the fine maps of individual battlefield sectors should have been supplemented with an overall map to orient readers. Those unfamiliar with the battle will need to consult a conventional history, but Civil War buffs will delight in this gripping addition to the literature of Gettysburg.