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

April 1865: The Month That Saved America (P.S.) | Jay Winik | Where's the beef?

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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

civil war excerpt

an excellent accounting of one crucial month that ended the war and ended pres; Lincoln.. first rate..

Where's the beef?

First, let me state clearly that I found this book to be a good read. Unfortunately, this book barely lives up to its own title - "April 1865, The Month That Saved America" - that's what I expected this book to be about, but far too many pages were devoted to background information and greatly abreviated biography's of many of the men who would become major players in the ending of the Civil War and the immediate aftermath. Background info and bio's are not bad things - when they are used to set the table for the main topic. Unfortunately, Winik spends so much time on background, his efforts on the topic at hand seem to be lacking.

Perhaps Winik's apparent distraction from his own topic can best be explained by the fact that, despite what Winik would have us believe, if you really drill down to the core of the book, there are only three major / pivotal events or "what ifs" during April 1865 (Lee's surrender, Johnston's surrender, and the plot by John Wilkes Booth and others that resulted in the assasination of Lincoln, the attempted assassination of Vice President Andrew Johnson, and the assassination of the Secretary of State), that supposedly fateful month. If other events were really that major, the author devotes too little space to them to convince me.

What's more - while I am not the most well read person on the Civil War, I have read a few of the basics, including McPherson's Battle Cry of Freedom. I won't accuse Winik of plagarism, and I did not pay attention to the footnotes in the book. All I can say is that I hope he gave a generous amount of credit to McPherson, as there are entire spans of pages where Winik is clearly copying Battle Cry of Freedom, nearly word for word.

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Balance and Judgment, well written

Good perspective and analysis. A thoughtful and useful short book for ACW fans and those of us who wonder what all the thunder and lightning ends up meaning.

Better Read than Heard

This isn't a bad book as Civil War volumes go. Winik's erudition and scholarship are satisfactory to the task at hand and there are some aspects of this most tragic episode in our nation's history that can't be emphasized enough, least of all the history changing decisions made by men who, despite their rise to greatness in the situations in which they found themselves, were flawed and only too human. Winik does a good job in bringing that important fact to light.

My only real problem was with the book on tape. A good editor can save an author from himself in print, but no one can rescue Winik in the terrible job he does here in reading his own material. Who ever told this guy he has a voice? I've worked in broadcasting and I know how much a good voice can add to the material and how much a bad voice can detract. This is why actors and announcers -professionals with trained voices- are usually hired to do the reading. Winik may be a good lecturer in class but he's terrible on tape, and who ever told him that Robert E. Lee spoke in that horrible falsetto? Really, it's embarrassing.

Get the book and read it. It's a good read. But avoid the book on tape at all costs. Unless, like me, you have a bottomless reservoir of patience, it will ruin the experience.

Let this be a warning to all authors with more ego than common sense.

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