I think I'd like to learn more about Gettysburg as that history lesson pretty much passed me by as I grew up in England.

Now whether I could way through the trunkful of books about Gettysburg coming through, well, I wouldn't have time.

**Oops - never added a review**

Concord Monitor - From Stephen W. Sears, a Gettysburg milestone

Sunday, Jun 29, 2003 | By MIKE PRIDE | Monitor editor

No American place is so captivating, or confusing, as the battlefield at Gettysburg. War changed the course of history there, but the field is so vast and contains so many monuments (more than 1,300) that it is hard to count them, much less measure the parts of valor and vanity carved into each.

So, during the last 140 years, the fighting of July 1-3, 1863, has been reduced in the popular imagination to a few places and events. The Wheatfield. The Peach Orchard. Culp's Hill. Seminary Ridge. The Copse. The Union defense of Little Round Top. And, above all, Pickett's Charge.

Modesto Bee - Two excellent historians revisit Gettysburg

Sears, whose "Gettysburg" (Houghton Mifflin, 640 pages, $30) will be published later this month, focuses on the battle, providing the best single-volume study in 30 years of what happened at Gettysburg from July 1 to 3, 1863. ... Sears quotes liberally from the diaries of many soldiers and the accounts of the foreign observers around Lee. (The Union had none; its only friend was Russia, which later sent naval squadrons as token support.) The English colonel, Arthur Fremantle, summed up the emotional situation best in noting that all the Confederates held their enemy in complete contempt.

Sears shows nothing was wrong with the Union army that a competent general couldn't cure.