Reader’s Choice: Eloquent Story or Musty History?

Promotional materials and early reviews have hailed Amanda Foreman’s mammoth twelve-years-in-the-making volume as a blockbuster account of a subject that has long been missing in the literature—that is, in the words of the subtitle, “Britain’s Crucial Role in the American Civil War.” Shortly after its initial publication in the United Kingdom (followed by its appearance some months later in the United States), reviewers as varied as Publishers Weekly, History Today, Military Review, the London Review of Books, and multiple newspapers praised A World on Fire to the high heavens. A couple of these hailed the topic as one neglected or a story never-before told. The reviewer for Elle Magazine (UK) heralded A World on Fire as “a sprawling, cinematic account” with “colorful personal details” that “confers dazzling . . . life” onto her subject, not, as that same reviewer pointedly observed, another of those “musty history books.”

Foreman is no stranger to fame. Her first book, Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire, won the Whitbread Book Award for biography and became a best seller and the basis for the 2008 Oscar-winning movie, “The Duchess.” In the aftermath, Foreman (and her family) became the featured subject of an extensive article in Vogue magazine, and she has sold the film rights to her new book as the basis for a TV miniseries by BBC in collaboration with HBO. Born in London, raised in Los Angeles, educated in England with a doctorate from Oxford University, and now living in New York while a Visiting Research Fellow at Queen Mary, University of London, she has followed the academic path as well as the entertainment model set by her father, Carl Foreman, who was the Oscar-winning screenwriter and producer of classic Hollywood films that include “High Noon,” “The Bridge on the River Kwai,” and “The Guns of Navarone.” The Sunday Times Magazine in the UK extolled A World on Fire in a cover story, complete with a full-color picture spanning the outside front page and showing the author wrapped in three flags—the Stars and Stripes, Stars and Bars, and Union Jack—all with the title “Divided She Stands.”

High praise indeed—and in many respects richly deserved. Foreman’s bibliography for A World on Fire is so extensive that the publishers opted to put it on her website rather than add it to a book already nearly a thousand pages in length. Her magnum opus stands as a well-crafted, kaleidoscopic view of a highly complex series of domestic and foreign events that incorporates close to 200 characters and 170 illustrations, plates, and maps. The result is an epic drama with no overarching thesis and precious little analysis, but one that has nonetheless garnered international attention. She is especially strong on graphically describing battles and the horror of war—particularly Shiloh, Antietam, Gettysburg, Vicksburg, Fredericksburg, the Wilderness, and Richmond’s final hours. Foreman’s work is a highly ambitious attempt to relate the entire story in chronological sequence, fleshed out by richly detailed accounts of social, political, military, economic, and diplomatic matters—all wrapped in a beautifully written and thoroughly researched narrative that succeeds in bringing this tumultuous period to life. As part of her effort to substantiate Britain’s role in the Civil War as “crucial,” she shows its longstanding cotton connection with the South, its sympathy with the so-called underdog, its shipyards producing Confederate warships, and its thousands of people who participated in the war. More than a few flagrantly violated Britain’s Foreign Enlistment Act by serving as officers and crew members of Confederate blockade runners and commerce raiders. Some Britons fought on both sides—with one, Henry Morton Stanley of “Dr. Livingstone I presume” fame, fighting...