Shadows on my heart : the Civil War diary of Lucy Rebecca Buck of Virginia /

The shifting tides of war brought Union and Confederate armies repeatedly to the doorstep of the Buck family, prosperous residents of the Valley of Virginia, during the Civil War. This wartime diary kept by 18-year-old Lucy, eldest daughter in the family of 13 children, is unusually rich in description, emotion, and detail of the family's varied and exciting wartime experiences. Unlike William Buck's edition of the diary (Sad Earth, Sweet Heaven, 1973), which primarily annotates military matters, Baer's version focuses on the disruptions of the domestic sphere and Lucy's responses to them. Regrettably neither edition reflects the full text of the diary. Baer (Gustavus Adolphus College) omits the "extraneous and repititious"; her annotations and index reflect her interest in Lucy's reading and other daily activities. Although Lucy's voice emerges more obviously in this edition, readers will find the editor's failure to identify people and places and the inadequate, sometimes inaccurate, explanations of the military situation in the notes frustrating. Nonetheless, the diary is extraordinarily revealing, and will interest everyone from general readers to scholars. All libraries. P. F. Field; Ohio University