cover image Eye of the Storm: A Civil War Odyssey

Eye of the Storm: A Civil War Odyssey

Robert Knox Sneden. Free Press, $37.5 (352pp) ISBN 978-0-684-86365-8

Shortly after the firing on Fort Sumter in 1861, 29-year-old Robert Sneden joined the 40th New York Volunteer Infantry. Sneden's prewar career as an architect/engineer attracted the attention of higher officers, and the young Canadian was detached as a cartographer for most of his brief military career, seeing action in the Second Manassas and on a few other occasions. On November 27, 1863, Sneden was seized by rebel troops led by the famed John S. Mosby and hustled south to a Richmond prison. In early 1864, he was among the first batch of Union prisoners sent to Andersonville, Ga., where more than 13,000 prisoners died. After transfers to other Southern camps, Sneden was finally exchanged in December 1864. Throughout his army career, Sneden kept a journal and sketched numerous sites of his experiences. Although the journal itself has disappeared, a very journal-like postwar memoir of some 5,000 pages based on his wartime experience and heavily illustrated by him has been found. Editors Bryan and Lankford, of the Virginia Historical Society (which owns the Sneden collection), have excerpted the more important sections of this compellingly straightforward account and provided more than 70 color illustrations of battle fields, city layouts and other scenes that caught Sneden's precise, cartographic eye. Summaries fill in blanks from the larger work, and brief identifications of period people and terms are helpfully included, but it's really the pictures that tell the best story here. The end result is a pleasing palate of vivid (if not quite reflective) descriptions and terrific watercolors from a patriotic man. History Book Club main selection; BOMC and Military Book Club alternate; first serial to Civil War Illustrated. (Oct.)