Patrick Brennan, along with co-author, Dylan Brennan, have created a visually stunning and exhaustively researched book, specifically addressing the by now iconic Battle of Gettysburg. The thorough text alone (gathered from primary source & others' research) gives the reader a complete narrative of this almost incomprehensible event in our US history but the absolute main attraction here is the use of current (at the time) photographs and woodcuts that have been painstakingly colorized to provide a complete, almost minute by minute accounting of the battle, taken to another level. To simply allude to the accompanying visual evidence would be doing this work a disservice for it absolutely drives the narrative and brings it home to the reader. From the first colorized post battle photo, Sharpsburg’s Dunker Church, the reader is knocked back by the relevance and contemporary sense of the earlier mayhem in viewing the deceased soldiers, lying in repose on a now bucolic field with a small church as their backdrop. This reader personally has long studied b&w photography of earlier eras since the dawn of the camera and I have to admit to sometimes viewing these artifacts as almost quaint museum pieces, frozen in amber. I suspect many people have a similar response so when these photos and woodcuts are so realistically colorized, the effect then is a startling one, almost producing an uncomfortable feeling of recognition; that the folks contained within these images could be people you'd known; not ones who'd lived 150+ years ago. As much as I consider myself a visual person, my dull imagination would not have thought to work the same colorizing magic on the medium of old woodcuts but that effect completely dialed up the level of action that fit the narrative text perfectly and gave it an almost cinematic quality. All in all, it combined to give this famous event a contemporary feel; inducing in the reader the sense that this all could've happened a few weeks ago. I would be remiss if I did not heartily advise each reader to pay attention to both the note on process as well as the note on sources as the reader will come away with an enhanced appreciation of what it took to bring this work to fruition and a deeper understanding of the work itself. I realize that there is much scholarship out there already on the American Civil War and on Gettysburg itself but there is nothing that exists like this work and I feel that this will enter the pantheon of Civil War studies as well as occupying its own unique multimedia space in US history. Kudos to Pat and Dylan Brennan and company for this wonderful work, it has been a pleasure to read it.