Books: Civil War Reporter

MY DIARY NORTH AND SOUTH (268 pp. abridged)—by William Howard Russell, edited by Fletcher Pratt—Harper ($4). "There entered, with a shambling, loose, irregular, almost unsteady gait, a tall, lank, lean man considerably over six feet in height, with stooping shoulders and long pendulous arms terminating in hands of extraordinary dimensions . . . He was dressed in an ill-fitting, wrinkled suit of black, which put one in mind of an undertaker's uniform at a funeral . . . His turned-down shirt collar disclosed a sinewy, muscular yellow neck; and above that . . . bristling and compact like a riff of...