Eye of the Storm: A Civil War Odyssey

xvi, 329 pp. Eye of the Storm is one of the most important Civil War documents ever published. Four tattered scrapbooks found in a Connecticut bank vault in 1994 have yielded a treasure trove of more than five hundred watercolors and maps that vividly depict America's great national conflict. These scrapbooks, and the accompanying memoir, are the life's work of a long-forgotten Union private and mapmaker named Robert Knox Sneden, who witnessed some of the war's greatest campaigns and spent more than a year in Southern prison camps, including Andersonville.