This is a long and comprehensive history of the Civil War. It makes an excellent first book for people who are interested in the subject and want to get in depth. McPherson does a very good job mixing in strategy and battle descriptions (with a middling amount of depth that worked well for me) with sidebars about other issues like POWs, battlefield medicine, diplomacy with Europe, etc. It gives a clear explanation of the back and forth flow of the war and helped me learn a lot more about US and Confederate internal politics during the war. I got some flashes of personality from the players, but would have appreciated more fleshing out beyond the very top leaders.

It includes a lot of the run-up to the war, but ends abruptly after Appomattox and leaves the Lincoln assassination and reconstruction to other volumes.

The maps weren't very useful in an e-book format.

This was written 35 years ago, so I would be interested to see what current historians think about it and how scholarship has changed.