Focused on the pivotal year of 1863, the second volume of Shelby Foote's masterful narrative history brings to life the Battle of Gettysburg and Grant's Vicksburg campaign and covers some of the most dramatic and important moments in the Civil War. Includes maps throughout. 'This, then, is narrative history--a kind of history that goes back to an older literary tradition.... The writing is superb...one of the historical and literary achievements of our time.' --The Washington Post Book World ' Mr. Foote has an acute sense of the relative importance of events and a novelist's skill in directing the reader's attention to the men and the episodes that will influence the course of the whole war, without omitting items which are of momentary interest. His organization of facts could hardly be better.' --Atlantic 'Though the events of this middle year of the Civil War have been recounted hundreds of times, they have rarely been re-created with such vigor and such picturesque detail.' --The