Books: Great Captain

MIGHTY STONEWALL (547 pp.)—Frank Vandiver—McGraw-Hill ($6.50).

If the young Thomas Jonathan Jackson had been called up in World War II, he would have been a problem. The doctors would have noted that he was underweight, had weak eyes and a bad stomach. The psychiatrists would have frowned at his religious fanaticism, his unwillingness to fight on Sunday, and his neurotic habit of raising one arm in the air to "lighten it" because he was convinced that it was heavier than the other one.

Despite these quirks and quiddities, when Stonewall Jackson fell, mortally wounded...