April 1865: The Month That Saved America (P.S.) | Jay Winik

April 1865: The Month That Saved America (P.S.) | Jay Winik | Civil War

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April 1865: The Mo...

	April 1865: The Month That Saved America (P.S.) Jay Winik Harper Perennial, 2006 - 512 pages average customer review:based on 197 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

The Confederacy is crushed. What will the peace be like?

Several men and their stories are covered in this book: for example, Robert E. Lee's attempt to escape Virginia with the Army of Northern Virginia; Nathan Bedford Forrest's dilemna on how to exit the conflict after so many victories over his Yankee foes; John Wilkes Booth's agony over the end of the Southern dream, a dream which he had never took upon himself to serve yet he felt he was speaking for the South when he decided to take out Abraham Lincoln -- the South's best friend at the end of the war; and several other men and their stories. We also learn how close Lee came to dissolving the Army of Northern Virginia and taking the war to the hills, as so many of his officers suggested. With guerilla warfare lasting for years across the battered Southern landscape, how could the country ever heal its differences? Winik discusses these problems and what became of them in this great book.

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Civil War

Bought this as a Christmas Gift for my brother in law and he just loved it. Sat right down and began to read it as soon as he opened it. Great book for Civil war buffs.

Great book

I got this as a gift for my husband and he is really enjoying it.

Review of "April 1865"

This is an absolutely wonderful book. A true "page turner". I liked it so much that I have bought 5 or 6 copies and given them as gifts to friends. It covers an important episode in our history which, I suspect, most people other than historians of this period are not very familiar with. The assasination of President Lincoln is, of course, known to all, but the story, as related by Mr. Winick, is much more complex.

There is one small error in the book that has nothing to do with the Civil War. On page 4, Mr. Winick says that Thomas Jefferson decided to call his home outside of Charlottesville Monticello meaning "little mountain" in Italian because he had a "requisite trace of humility".

That is unlikely. In fact, the accepted story is that he named his house Monticello because it lies at the foot of a larger mountain. I doubt that Jefferson at age 26 or so was worried about being humble. The problem is that it is not really possible to see why he named the house "little mountain" unless you go on top of the larger mountain which lies adjacent and southwest of Monticello (called Carter's Mountain and now owned by the Monticello Memorial Foundation) and look down on Monticello and it becomes very clear why he named it what he did. Monticello is a "little" hill compared to the larger mountain. Unfortunately, just visiting Monticello and looking up at the larger mountain does not give the same impression.

A great book.

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