The end result reads like a personal experience. It is carved out of primary sources:- reports filed only to be buried and the infamy condoned, the sadist who boasted of his achievement confirmed in his horrifying perfomance letters, diaries smuggled out, stories written afterwards, contemporary eye witness accounts, notes left and saved by descendants of prisoners and Jailers interviews with those descendants historical accounts year after year. This is a searing book - a reading experience no one will forget. For Andersonville was a project pre-dating his Long Remember the now-classic novel of Gettysburg. It took a close-up view of Buchenwald when it was opened to war correspondents to bring home the horrors he had read about in Andersonville MacKinlay Kantor knew he must put into book form the research he'd been doing for 25 years. Andersonville, the prisoner stockade in Georgia, twenty acres hewn out of a pine woods, counted for more dead in fourteen months of the Civil War than Bull Run, Antietam and Gettysburg combined. Man's inhumanity to Man - and the redeeming flashes of mercy - this is the theme at the heart of this grim record in fictional form of one of the blots on the nation's history.
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