The Reunion

April 1865: The Month That Saved America, by jay Winik (HarperCollins, 461 pp., $32.50)

THE most enduring image of the Civil War is probably the burning of Atlanta—as carried out not by General Sherman, but by David O. Selznick in Gone with the Wind. Jay Winik, in his new book about the war’s endgame, stages the fall of Richmond with an equally impressive visual power. The author matches his wide-angle descriptions of the explosions and fires with some finely rendered close-ups: Jefferson Davis straightening out his desk, prior to abandoning it, lest the approaching Federals “think him sloppy”; a slavetrader trying to board 50 pieces of chained human property at the pandemoniac train depot, then getting the message of a new world from a bayonet-wielding Confederate who orders the slaves set free.

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Thomas Mallon

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April 1865: The Month That Saved America, by jay Winik (HarperCollins, 461 pp., $32.50)

THE most enduring image of the Civil War is probably the burning of Atlanta—as carried out not by General Sherman, but by David O. Selznick in Gone with the Wind. Jay Winik, in his new book about the war’s endgame, stages the fall of Richmond with an equally impressive visual power. The author matches his wide-angle descriptions of the explosions and fires with some finely rendered close-ups: Jefferson Davis straightening out his desk, prior to abandoning it, lest the approaching Federals “think him sloppy”; a slavetrader trying to board 50 pieces of chained human property at the pandemoniac train depot, then getting the message of a new world from a bayonet-wielding Confederate who orders the slaves set free.