Images from the Storm: 300 Civil War Images by the Author of Eye of the Storm

If Vietnam was the first television war, the Civil War was the first to use mass-produced battlefield sketches and drawings as adjuncts to news reports, filling the pages of publications such as Harper's and Frank Leslie's Illustrated Weekly. One illustrator, a Union private named Robert Sneden, had plenty of opportunities to practice his art at close range, turning out nearly a thousand sketches, maps, and plans of the great battles in which he participated.

Images from the Storm, the follow-on from last year's bestselling Eye of the Storm, gathers more than 300 of those images that Sneden made of clashes at Second Manassas, Malvern Hill, Antietam, Yorktown and others. Some of the images are panoramic, capturing miles-long lines of infantry and cities under siege; others depict smaller scenes of war, such as dancing "contraband," or freed slaves, and the graves of the fallen. Of particular interest to historians are Sneden's drawings of the Confederate prison camps at Richmond and, notoriously, Andersonville, where he spent much of the year 1864 after he was captured by John Singleton Mosby's cavalry at Brandy Station, Virginia. One of those images became nationally known after the war, note the book's editors, accompanying an account of the war crimes trial and subsequent execution of the Andersonville camp commander.

These works, one scholar has noted, constitute "the single most important collection of Civil War art to be discovered in this century." Students of that conflict will find this critical edition to be of much interest and use as a companion to other accounts. --Gregory McNamee