Best Selling Books by Shelby Foote

On the eve of the Civil War''s 150th commemoration, preservationist and photographer Nell Dickerson showcases the architectural heritage devastated by the War, mansions as well as cabins. Her photographs are accompanied by the text of "Pillar of fire," from the novel Jordan County by Shelby Foote.

Before Shelby Foote under took his epic history of the Civil War, he wrote this fictional chronicle -- "a landscape in narrative" -- of Jordan County, Mississippi, a place where the traumas of slavery, war, and Reconstruction are as tangible as rock formations. The seven stories in Jordan County move backward in time, from 1950 to 1797, and through the lives of characters as diverse as a black horn player doomed by tuberculosis and convulsive jealousy, a tormented and ineffectual fin-de-siecle aristocrat, and a half-wild frontiersman who builds a plantation in Choctaw territory only to watch it burn at the close of the Civil War. In prose of almost Biblical gravity; and with a deep knowledge of the ways in which history shapes human lives -- and sometimes warps them beyond repair -- Foote gives us an ambitious, troubling work of fiction that builds on the traditions of William Faulkner and Flannery O''Connor but that is resolutely unique.

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The second volume is dominated by the almost continual confrontation of great armies. The starting point for this volume is the Battle of Fredericksburg, fought in and around Fredericksburg, Virginia, from December 11 to December 15, 1862, between General Robert E. Lee''s Confederate States Army and the Army of Northern Virginia and the Army of the Potomac, commanded by Major general Ambrose E. Burnside. It continues through to the meticulous destruction of Meridian, Mississippi, in February 1864 by General Sherman. This volume is full of the life of the times--the elections of 1863, the resignations of Seward and Chase, the Conscription riots, the mounting opposition (on both side) to the crushing war, and then the inescapable resolution that it must go on.