Book recommendation

Usually, tall books with lots of pictures are fun to leaf through, but aren't the sort of thing one reads from cover to cover. But James McPherson's Battle Cry of Freedom, which is, by general acclamation, the best one-volume history of the Civil War, has been re-published in a large picture-filled format as The Illustrated Battle Cry of Freedom, without losing anything. We got it for Christmas, and I've been reading, or rather, re-reading it with avidity