Every generation christens its own favored Civil War book, almost by clockwork. Twenty-five years ago, James McPherson brought forth his richly awarded and eminently readable Battle Cry of Freedom, just as — some 25 years earlier — the Bruce Catton volumes were scaling the bestseller lists, and just as — a couple of decades before that — Stephen Vincent Benét’s epic poem John Brown’s Body treated the years between 1859 and 1865 with sweep and lyricism for a more literary readership. All three labors garnered a Pulitzer Prize. When it comes to the Civil War, we Americans have chosen not to skimp; we take it in bracing drafts. People who can scarcely muster the attention required to read a meaty magazine article happily commit to long, elaborate, detail-drunken tomes on the struggle that has made us who we are today, from the grandeur of the Thirteenth Amendment to Gone with the Wind to tacky (and misshapen) Confederate-battle-flag car plates.

The thirst never gets slaked. We pine for the perfect history of a war that refuses to loosen its hold on our imaginations and, here and there after all these years, loyalties. Still, we cannot have too many Civil War books because we cannot have too many appraisals and reappraisals. And the Civil War industry ensures that they keep coming. Only a few weeks ago, we learned of a new estimate of the accidentally or deliberately underplayed number of those killed, raised from the 600,000 figure we all grew up with to 720,000.

Now, as if on cue, a new book appears. Allen C. Guelzo, professor of history at Gettysburg College and author of other nutritious works on the period, joins the heady roster of scholars and literary men who have set out to recount meticulously and pronounce upon magisterially the greatest, most sustained catastrophe in the annals of the United States. Like its worthy predecessors, Fateful Lightning can claim a compact completeness (no small feat), but unlike them, it can also claim the benefit of an ever-burgeoning pool of the latest information, which is another reason we hit a reset button every few years — there’s always more to account for: new facts to digest, new interpretations to vet. Yet this book is comprehensively economical, as exactingly accurate as scholarship allows, and, befitting its subject, sober.

Any historian out to pen a full account of the Civil War must decide what kind of book to write. Should it be a grand catalogue of colossal battles and the brave, saucy characters that flooded the ranks on both sides, with all the drama ready-made for spirited retelling for the sake of a predominantly self-captivated audience? (Shelby Foote’s capacious three-volume narrative history — a fine literary achievement if ever there was one, which took four times as long to write as it took the war to be waged — is of this type, and the approach requires no defense. It’s Homer’s.) Or should the book be an academic disquisition on larger significance and historical meaning, on the multiple causes and effects of the war, political and otherwise, one that methodically factors in up-to-date findings on things like troop movements, hardware, provisions, disease mortality, civilian opinion, and the aftershocks of Reconstruction, and offers a newly minted evaluation of ways we ought to think about the cataclysm?

Guelzo’s ambitions are imperial. While avid to tell the entire story of the war as a war, blood and gore and gunpowder and dust and dysentery and all, he has opted mostly for the second, broader course, and he has, against the odds, produced a book smoothly accessible to any curious adult who lacks a deeper knowledge of the time.

He employs a long runway into the story, springboarding poignantly, as others have done, from the chilly day of Lincoln’s second inaugural. But his excursion immediately takes us back much farther, to the fallible age of the Founders, and moves forward to the days when the seeds of sectional dissent were sown and a bitter crop grew as the decades progressed toward Fort Sumter. Here he shows himself a deft reader of crafty politicking, exploring with precision the flawed strategy of the Missouri Compromise of 1820 and the failure of Henry Clay with the Great one of 1850, showing how the balances all seemed doomed to go out of kilter as soon as they were created. Slavery, both as an inherited engine of economic power and as a powder keg, is dealt with as it ought to be — directly, evidentially, unsentimentally, uncomfortably.

Eventually, the principals take the stage — Lincoln, Lee, McClellan, Sherman, Joe Johnston, Stonewall Jackson, Ulysses S. Grant. Personalities prance and strut. The war itself, with all its battles, bivouacs, night marches, and terror, gets played out with the necessary detail, though Guelzo the historian is concerned with context and truth before theater, with how the wins and losses on the field fit into the larger puzzle of the conflict, altering for example the revolving shades of sympathy and antipathy of the British and the French toward the Confederacy.

Guelzo assembles the story ably, but he injects no adrenaline into the reader; his manner isn’t breathless. But neither is it exactly that of a dry lecturer. “No one in American history,” he tells us, “has ever looked less like a great general than Ulysses Grant,” and then explains simply and efficiently how such an unlikely figure won a war. All the familiar figures get woven nicely into the tapestry. Asides on passing characters rarely fail to pull up tasty nuggets, spicy bits of information we either forgot or, more likely, never knew, yet all of which keep a sometimes knotty, intricate tale rolling apace.

Perhaps the book’s strongest points, though, lie in the realm of explication and illustration, in the work that the professional historian can best do. This is a book not of history alone but of historiography as well: It’s not only about the tales but also about the tellers and elucidators who have, over time, determined how we view the war. Perusing a good deal of literary material from books, tracts, and intellectual periodicals of the day, Guelzo ranges far as a cultural historian, into regions of poetry and applied psychology. Explaining how even the most reputable historians can fall victim to stereotypes other historians before them have advanced uncritically, he takes on the supposition that politicians on both sides fell victim to “irrational” thinking and acting in the decade before the shooting began:

It seems only human nature to hang the label irrational on what we do not understand, since it is easy for us to assume that something must be irrational if our ingenuity is unequal to the task of deciphering it. That may actually reflect more on the limits of our ingenuity than on any supposed irrationality in what we are studying. For that reason it should come as a practical and fundamental warning not to impute irrationality to people in the study of history . . . too quickly.

And with this we know we are in the presence of a deliberative mind. How easily, we’re reminded, can history as we know it arise from idle speculating and a hunger for convenient conclusions. Recounting battles with color and dash is one thing, but thinking clearly and cogently about the most incendiary event in American history requires more than a bit of caution and tact.

Guelzo is nothing if not tactful, and he works with a vigilance made needful by the momentous investment of passion the Civil War has inspired for the past 150 years. Readers in search of major revisionist departures from orthodox thinking on the war will be disappointed. But the author of Lincoln and Douglas: The Debates That Defined America, Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation: The End of Slavery in America, and Abraham Lincoln: Redeemer President has earned the right to paint the wide panorama.

For those of us who prefer to take our history as straight prose, the apparatus of scholarship can become something of an encumbrance, and the abundant footnotes could have been ushered into the back as endnotes so we wouldn’t have to swat those gnats at the bottom of the page from our peripheral vision. But that’s less than a quibble. Fateful Lightning could serve as foundation reading in any college course on the Civil War, though it’s too well composed to be deemed a textbook, as textbooks, in the humanities, anyway, tend to be directed not to students eager to learn but to academic consumers out only to pass the test. This book was written to be read, not merely consulted, and it can be read profitably by general readers, especially those wishing to probe past the choreographed bromides of the History Channel.