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Title: The Civil War

Author: Bruce Catton

Narrator: Barrett Whitener

Format: Unabridged

Length: 8 hrs and 3 mins

Language: English

Release date: 12-16-99

Publisher: Blackstone Audio, Inc.

Ratings: 4 of 5 out of 167 votes

Genres: History, American

Publisher's Summary:

For a person seeking a single volume to serve as a captivating introduction and a dependable guide through all the maze of battles and issues of the Civil War, this is an audiobook without parallel. Bruce Catton understood the Civil War - its participants and battles - and he unfolds it with skill and simplicity. Of all historians past and present, Bruce Catton ranks among the best.

©1960 by American Heritage, Inc.; (P)1991 by Blackstone Audiobooks

Critic Reviews:

"[The Civil War] is everything we have come to expect from the practiced hand of Bruce Catton: scholarly, judicious, clear, and unfailingly interesting. It would be difficult to find a better introduction to the Civil War than this book.

Members Reviews:

The American Civil War

Having visited the Civil War battle ground to the NE of Atlanta on my last visit to the States I thought I could learn more through this book.

I found the information contained within to be excellent and very thorough, spoiled only by an inferior sound quality that at times had an incredible amount of low frequency bass boost.

If you are able to put up with this annoying inconvenience, the listener is well rewarded.

Great for general interest

This is a very good basic history of the Civil War. I suspect that it would leave most hard-core Civil War buffs a little cold, because it does not contain a lot of blow-by-blow narration of each battle, nor is there minute analysis of the military tactics. One might say that this is the war as Lincoln would have seen it rather than as Grant or McClellan or Lee did.

good book, fair sound

The book was great, but I found the sound a bit hard to understand at times (fuzzy). Not one of their better quality recordings. (Listened to the highest quality version on an iPod; never had this problem before.)

The reader also had an unfortunate "professor-like" voice that didn't help.

Excellent overview of the Civil War

This book provides an excellent overview of the Civil War. Adults seeking a relatively quick summary of personalities, battles, and social, economic, and political forces would do well to listen to this book. The pace of the book gives the listener a little taste of everything without dwelling too long on any one event. I was especially thankful that this book did not included detailed battle descriptions (troop movements, charges, etc), though overviews of important battles were included. With regard to the narrator, I think the Audible clip is not representative of the tone he takes through the entire book. I thought the narration was fine if a little lacking in inflection at first. I highly recommend the audio version of this book.

Great introduction to the civil war

Much less detailed than the epic tombs from Foote and McPherson, and Catton himself. This is a great macro level overview of the war but I found his more interpretive discussions of the soldier and post war attitude also compelling. The story he weaved was much less technical than other authors.