David Blight's book points out that historians, writers, critics and cultural commentators were still influenced by and engaging with the meaning of the American Civil War one hundred years after the event. The book focusses on four writers, Robert Penn Warren, Bruce Catton, Edmund Wilson and James Baldwin, who all wrote within the context of the Civil War Centennial commemorations that segued with a nascent civil rights movement.

Blight focusses on the signal works of the authors during the period: poet–novelist Robert Penn Warren's nonfictional Legacy of the Civil War (1961) and fictional Wilderness: A Tale of the Civil War (1961); Bruce Catton's (“by far the most popular and widely read American historian of the Civil War” during the period) Stillness at Appomattox (1953) and The Coming Fury (1961); Edmund Wilson's (“widely regarded as America's preeminent literary critic of the twentieth century”) Patriotic Gore: Studies in the Literature of the American Civil War (1962); and James Baldwin's (“perhaps the greatest essayist of the era”) Notes of a Native Son (1955), Nobody Knows My Name (1961) and The Fire Next Time (1963) (all quotes at 7).

Collectively, Blight sees the work of the four authors as being bound by the idea of tragedy, albeit expressed in different ways. Warren's is a metaphysical tragedy, with the Civil War a prism through which to view the larger questions of human agency, historical determinism, and transcendent battles between good and evil. Catton's tragedy is one of human suffering and sacrifice in writing military histories that also speak to the war's devastating personal impact on those who did the fighting. Wilson's tragedy is more of a lament. In his grand survey of the fictional literature of the Civil War he came to the conclusion that the bloodshed had not been worth the sacrifice. Baldwin's tragedy, as might be expected, was that of the legacy of slavery and racism. He challenged white readers not to ignore but to confront the central role that race played amid the romance and derring-do of the war in mythical memory.

Blight's book provides a fascinating and multilevelled meditation on the memory of the Civil War. It paints portraits of four very different but important writers; it probes the American psyche during the Civil War Centennial in an innovative way; it reflects on the role of the Civil War in US history at a time when, during the current sesquicentennial, it is once again sharply focussed in the public eye; and it has much to say about the wider issues of history, myth and memory.

No doubt some will question the limited perspective used to chart these larger themes. Four authors represent a narrow sample. Women's voices are notably absent in the text, and Blight acknowledges that his four writers possessed a “masculine preoccupation with war” (9). There is only one African American voice among the four authors, and there is a notable lack of southern African American voices, although Blight does provide a vignette of Martin Luther King Jr.'s 1963 “I Have a Dream” speech in the prologue as it relates to Lincoln's 1863 “Gettysburg Address.” Blight also conducts a brief analysis of Ralph Ellison's 1965 essay–story “Tell It Like It Is, Baby” in the epilogue.

Blight acknowledges that there are many more writers he could have included in this or a much larger study. But the choices he makes work well for the particular story he is trying to tell, in what is a relatively short volume. The book is certainly suggestive in pointing to the interactions and interconnections between arguably the two defining domestic events of the American nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Too little has been written about the historical interplay between the Civil War and the civil rights movement and there is much more to be said. However, most of the works examined here come from the earlier period of the late 1950s and early 1960s when the movement was unfolding and it would be equally intriguing to look at how later developments impacted on Civil War literature and history in the mid- to late 1960s and after. A sesquicentennial sequel in the offing, maybe?