Our Favorite Books: Ted Savas’s Top 5 Books

The phrase so “So little time, so many books” is doubly true if you are also a publisher. Picking five favorites is damn near impossible, but let me give it a quick try. Here they are, in no particular order.

Lee’s Lieutenants: A Study in Command, 3 vols., Douglas Southall Freeman.

My grandfather brought home a pummeled rummage-sale copy of the first volume. Why, I have no idea. It was my first Civil War book. I was about 12. Who knew. I read it aloud walking along the lilac-studded northern boundary of our Iowa property. After a steady barrage of questions, my mother tired of the game and dropped a dictionary on a basswood stump. I got the message: do your own research. I spent the next week living with a cadre of men I would never meet, challenging myself as I flipped through a fat Webster’s imagining another time and place. To this day I still smell sweet lilac whenever someone mentions the Battle of Malvern Hill. I remember how excited I was when I discovered there were three volumes in the series. I devoured the stirring Introduction and first chapter of vol. 2 leaning against the sun-warmed polished granite of the Union soldier’s memorial obelisk in our small Central Park, and the third in the back of a Dodge station wagon and on the stoop of a brownstone in Brooklyn, NY. The colossal scope of the Civil War began to dawn on me. My grandfather’s dime was a small price to pay for a lifetime of passion.

Antietam: The Photographic Legacy of America’s Bloodiest Day by William Frassanito.

I have been a member of the History Book Club since the 1970s. This was one of my favorite and early purchases. Like a car accident, it is impossible to turn away from the visuals. It also introduced me to my favorite campaign. This is a hard book to put down and an incredibly poignant read.

The Civil War: A Narrative, 3 vols., by Shelby Foote

I had this set for years and hauled them house-to-house unread until the mid 1980s, when I hurt my back so bad I couldn’t get out of bed for several weeks and thought it was a good opportunity to jump give them a try. Yes, they lean a little on the Southern side and no, they don’t have footnotes. But the writing is exquisite, and the flow, cadence, and coverage is magnificent. There are many reasons to recommend this set to everyone. The primary reason I recommend it to people who want to learn more about the war is so they can understand its sweeping nature and better grasp what it is they enjoy and what areas of study they would like to drill down into. If you have not yet tackled this set, what are you waiting for?

Jefferson Davis: The Man and His Hour by William C. Davis

Jack Davis is a good friend, and I think this is his best book. I have read it at least twice and know firsthand that writing biography is incredibly difficult. This intimate examination of Davis, warts and all, is simply first-rate and often reads like a novel. It gave me a much better understanding of the Confederate chief executive, especially who he was before the war, and why he was who he was. If you are going to read one Southern biography, make it this one.

The War Outside My Window: The Civil War Diary of LeRoy Wiley Gresham, 1860 to 1865, Janet E Kroon, editor.

I’ve published hundreds of books, and love most of them, but this one gripped my heart from the beginning and won’t let go. Part of it is because I was so deeply involved in the process and wrote most of the footnotes because Jan is more of a genealogist than a military historian. That was part of the deal, and I readily accepted it. LeRoy was a tortured soul–a man living in a boy’s dying body. His diary put flesh on the bones of the members of his home, none of whom we would know much of anything about today if not for his desire to chronicle his own troubled life and times. Just as Downton Abbey covered the pinnacle of the estate class in England (the Irish/servants downstairs and family upstairs) and its subsequent decline, so too does LeRoy’s journal, starting at the top of the slave-holding aristocracy and running, almost daily, right through its collapse. It is the only full account we have of the entire war as seen from inside a slave-holding family’s home. I often pick it up and read some of the entries. I think this might be the most important book I have ever published.