No Quarter: The Battle of the Crater, 1864.(Brief article)(Book review)

No Quarter: The Battle of the Crater, 1864 Richard Slotkin. Random, $28 (432p) ISBN 978-1-4000-6675-9

Three decades after publishing a novel on the Battle of the Crater, Wesleyan professor emeritus Slotkin offers a historical analysis of an event meant as a turning point in the Civil War but remembered instead as one of its greatest failures. Most accounts focus on the slaughter of hundreds of black Union troops; Slotkin takes a broader perspective. The Crater was intended to draw on the Union's strengths, like the mastery of industrial technology, and the physical energies liberated by black emancipation. A regiment of coal miners dug a 500-foot tunnel under a …