The War is Over

Tonight, I finished the third and final volume of Shelby Foot's Civil War: A Narrative.  It took me just under a year to read all three, including breaks between volumes. Still, that is significantly less than the twenty years Shelby took to write it.  In my opinion, it is a monumental work, an American epic that inspires the reader to seek more knowledge about the vast cast of characters that lived and breathed during the four most turbulent years in American history.

I will miss it, but I'm also glad to have completed it. While I've read several other books alongside Shelby, I have never felt free to fully concentrate on any of them.  It is time to move on, both in my Civil War reading and in other genres. I don't know if I'll ever read it again, but I suspect I will take it down from the shelf on numerous occassions, just to see what ol' Shelby had to say on a given subject.