ABSTRACT
WILSON attempts to provide balance in his own perspective by choosing 30 authors from both the public and private spheres. He defends his choice of non-literary sources by asserting the value of multiple perspectives in giving us a total picture. Yet, Wilson’s book is sorely dated by its naturalistic approach to US history and its underlying fear of nuclear annihilation. Wilson was writing when the Cold War was at its most volatile, during the Bay of Pigs disaster and the Cuban Missile Crisis, and his personal agenda skews an otherwise insightful reading of the War. “The difference between man and the other forms of life is that man has succeeded in cultivating enough of what he calls ‘morality’ and ‘reason’ to justify what he is doing in terms of what he calls ‘virtue’ and ‘civilization’”. War, then, is a means unto itself, and constructing meaning out of it is merely an exercise to validate ourselves as something other than animalistic. Despite the seeming contradictions when he declares himself divorced from moralizing, Wilson’s reading of Civil-War literature provides a perceptive appreciation of the War, its possible meaning, and the writer’s attempt to deal with it.
