Gettysburg The Last Invasion [Paperback]

Winner of the Guggenheim-Lehrman Prize in Military History

AnEconomistBest Book of the Year

AKirkus ReviewsBest Nonfiction Book of the Year

The Battle of Gettysburg has been written about at length and thoroughly dissected in terms of strategic importance, but never before has a book taken readers so close to the experience of the individual soldier.

Two-time Lincoln Prize winner Allen C. Guelzo shows us the face, the sights and the sounds of nineteenth-century combat: the stone walls and gunpowder clouds of Pickett’s Charge; the reason that the Army of Northern Virginia could be smelled before it could be seen; the march of thousands of men from the banks of the Rappahannock in Virginia to the Pennsylvania hills. What emerges is a previously untold story of army life in the Civil War: from the personal politics roiling the Union and Confederate officer ranks, to the peculiar character of artillery units. Through such scrutiny, one of history’s epic battles is given extraordinarily vivid new life.Praise for Allen C. Guelzo'sGettysburg

“Graphic and emotionally affecting . . . an extraordinarily detailed and realistic account.”
—The New York Times Book Review
 
“This is a masterful battle study, masterfully told. . . . Engaging. . . . Guelzo’s narrative is enlivened by frequent use of accounts by battle participants, observers and Gettysburg civilians, and his descriptions sometimes rise almost to lyricism.”
—The Seattle Times
 
“[A] rich, original work. . . . Guelzo’s book enlarges the conventional battle narrative. . . . It’s his expansive, rolling storytelling that makes this book so engrossing and sets Guelzo’sGettysburgapart from the many others. . . . Through those pages runs a thoroughly readable description of every hour of those three hellish days, in enough dels·