The Civil War In Photographs by William C Davis (Carlton, £30)

THE Civil War was the bloodiest conflict in American history, killing and maiming more than half-a-million people.

It would be the greatest clash of arms of the 19th Century, destined only to be eclipsed by the European calamity of 1914.

In the east, it raged from Washington to Richmond, destroying communities and producing straggling lines of landless refugees. Westwards, the tragedy stretched as far as Texas.

But this four-year struggle was unlike any other war. For coinciding with the outbreak of hostilities in 1861 was a ground-breaking innovation - the advent of the modern camera.

Daguerre had invented a crude device earlier in the century, but it was the development of a new type of portable camera that revolutionised photography. Thanks to techniques employing glass frames, it became possible for photographers to accompany the armies as they went on campaign.

More than a million pictures were taken during the war and the several hundred images reproduced in this book provide a tantalising glimpse of a nation in turmoil.

This book provides a remarkably pictorial essay of those far-off times. It's all here, captured in stark black and white. There are fresh-faced soldiers - many hardly out of their teens - bound for the front, plus battlefield vistas with woods and fields, together with the obligatory shattered farm buildings.

The images are accompanied by a sharply-written text. But it is the pictures themselves that really tell the story in all its unfolding drama.

John Phillpott