Ric Burns's six favorite books

Ric Burns is a writer and documentary filmmaker best known for producing and writing the PBS series The Civil War. One of his favorite books that influenced the making of his new film, Death and the Civil War, as told to The Week magazine:

Mary Chesnut's Civil War by Mary Boykin Chesnut

An indelible, eloquent, and ferociously intelligent account of the war from an intrguing source: Chesnut was the daughter of a wealthy South Carolina plantation owner and the wife of a former U.S. senator who worked closely with the president of the Confederacy, Jefferson Davis.

Read about the other books on Burns's list.

Mary Chesnut's Civil War is on Harold Holzer's five best list of Civil War diaries.

--Marshal Zeringue