Books: Reconstruction Blues

THE UNCONQUERED (689 pp.)−Ben Ames Williams—Thomas Allen ($5).

Ben Ames Williams was that rare creature, a historical novelist who cared about history. When he died last February at 63 he had written some 30 books (which sold 5,200,000 copies), many of them forming a kind of family album of the U.S. in wartime. Come Spring was a tale of Revolutionary days, Thread of Scarlet a close-up of the War of 1812, House Divided took in four sprawling years of Confederate history. The books were honest, uninspired, but engagingly readable—triumphs of plausibility and painstaking research.

The Unconquered, published posthumously, is a sequel to House...