"Eye of the Storm is one of the most important Civil War documents to be published since Ulysses S. Grant's Personal Memoirs. Four tattered scrapbooks found in a Connecticut bank vault in 1994 yielded a treasure trove of more than five hundred watercolors that vividly depict America's great national drama. These scrapbooks--plus a five-thousand-page illustrated memoir that came to light later--are the life's achievement of a long-forgotten Union private and mapmaker named Robert Knox Sneden."--Jacket.