THE BROTHERS’ WAR Civil War Letters to Their Loved Ones From the Blue and the Grey <i> edited by Annette Tapert (Vintage: $8.95, illustrated) </i>

This intriguing collection of letters uncovers the brutal reality underneath the romanticized image of the Civil War fostered by “Gone With the Wind” and other popular novels and films. The war began as a crusade for the soldiers on both sides, but that belief swiftly vanished. In August, 1862, Pvt. James Binford of the 21st Virginia Volunteer Infantry, wrote: “I have had enough of the glory of war. I am sick of seeing dead men and men’s limbs torn from their bodies. . . . When the war ends, if I am alive, no one will return to peaceful avocations more willingly than I.” Two months later, Lt. Samuel Nichols, who served in the 37th Massachusetts Volunteer Infantry, predicted, in a letter to his brother, that a victory by either side would inevitably produce a long legacy of bitterness.

These first-hand accounts of great battles and petty details of military life convey the terrible carnage of the war with an immediacy and intensity no conventional history can match.