I listened to it on tape. It’s a short history of the Civil War. Gettysburg takes about six minutes. The Monitor and Merrimack about two. What makes the book so good, beyond the suspenseful writing (I didn’t know who was going to win the Civil War until the very end of the book), is the multiple perspectives Catton brings to view the war by. He examines the different economies of North and South, the Navies, their alliances, and electoral politics. That means the battles, which so many books focus on, are placed in a much wider context and are not given undue weight. May, 2005