ye of the Storm presents more than a Civil War combat narrative. It addresses universal themes of the human condition as it leads the reader through the three major acts of Robert Sneden’s war. The first recounts the innocent jubilation as his regiment forms in New York City to march off and save the Union. By a stroke of good fortune, Sneden is detailed as a map maker at a general’s headquarters. The second plunges him into the physical terror of being under fire. The third, and longest, follows him through the quieter oppression of imprisonment, a tale of privation, depression, moral dilemmas, and ultimately, redemption.

      Through the eyes of one private soldier, we see the individual plucked from the ordinariness of civilian life and swept up in the cataclysm of war. The boredom and incompetence of camp are quickly replaced by the tumultuous, chaotic, fighting retreat of the Union army from the approaches to Richmond in 1862. He is then caught in the middle of a disastrous Union defeat at Second Bull Run, only to land a soft map-making job in Washington, D.C. After a year of office work and an active social life, Sneden returns to the field only to be captured by John S. Mosby’s rangers. Then, with his capture, Sneden confronts a year of imprisonment, a day- to-day struggle for survival that requires courage, perseverance, and compromise. This begins the longest narrative arc of the story--his experience of a succession of increasingly bad Confederate prisons There is a geographical parallel to the progressive degradation Sneden suffers and observes, for he and his comrades are shipped in cattle cars farther and farther south, ultimately to Andersonville.

      In the hot Georgia summer of 1864, this open camp becomes, by itself, the fifth largest "city" of the Confederacy. Sneden witnesses squalor, cruelty, and despair on a gigantic scale. In his malnourished state, his defiance of his captors finally succumbs to the realization that he must make moral compromises to survive. When he gives his parole to work as a prisoner-clerk for a Confederate surgeon, he knows he has crossed over the line. But he is a survivor.After a year in prison, he is exchanged in Charleston and sails north to freedom. Weakened, emaciated, afflicted by rheumatism in his legs and feet, given up for dead by his family, Sneden arrives home in Brooklyn in the snow at Christmas 1864.