Books: The Stockade

ANDERSONVILLE (767 pp.)—MacKinlay Kantor—World ($5).

Whether a soldier wore blue or grey during the Civil War, about the worst thing that could happen to him was to be taken prisoner. In Southern camps, 15 of every 100 Federals died; in the North, twelve out of every 100 Confederates died. But even in a day when most camps were shocking, the name of Andersonville most specifically spelled horror. Within this Georgia stockade, 100 miles south of Atlanta, as many as 127 men died in a single day, and during one three-month period, the total of dead exceeded the whole number of those on...