Often amongst themselves as well as society as a whole. It continues to follow the Main and Hazard family individuals and how they act and react against the circumstances of the Civil War years. The tale remains a wonderful read or listen. I have reviewed the earlier books separately. Love and War is Book Two, and this volume, Heaven and Hell is Book Three. According to Jake, we must learn to live with evil’s omnipresence and somehow survive notwithstanding. The Beast being evil: particularly as found in select hominoid subjects found throughout humanity and the novels. John Jake provides in Book Three of the North South Trilogy, the three volume series’ teaching. Learn from a New Perspective on Civil War History If, however, you are looking for more of a "Civil War" story, then you may be disappointed. I will likely listen to it again, which is high praise indeed from me. To summarize, I loved this book and the performance. As always, though, his work seems well researched and, although obviously fiction, is probably more reflective of reality than much of what passes for official histories. Jakes continues to be unsparing in his portraits of human nature as he tells the story of "how the west was won", and this could cause some to have a negative view of this story, especially those of a righteous bent. If, like me, you love well developed charters in a historical setting, then you will still find this book very enjoyable. This 3rd book is essentially the story of Charles Main and his life "out west". Ditto if you are looking for a lot more insight into the main characters of the first books. If, like some, you are interested in the stories from the civil war aspect, then the third will disappoint. If so, how you will find this third book depends on why you were reading the first two. Here, for instance, is Lincoln on the music of Rimsky-Korsakov: "Oceans churned, storms thundered, the sun sparkled in wintry forests, and in the new warmth of spring nightingales sang and golden fish leaped from crystal streams." Overall, however, Lincoln's marriage of history and the arts is a happy one, demonstrating how the peculiarly Russian tension between East and West and between politics and the arts helped produce artistic works that were both uniquely beautiful and uniquely Russian.I'm assuming that if you're thinking of reading book three, it means you've made it through the epic journey's that are books 1 and 2. No one ever seems to merely wear a medal, they wear it "proudly" a building is not simply painted turquoise when it can be "brilliant" turquoise. Unfortunately, Lincoln's purple prose can sometimes be distracting. Author of such histories as Romanovs and Nicholas I, Lincoln ably provides the context such a task requires. Much has been written about the subject over the years, but Lincoln poses himself a slightly different task: to depict not so much the history of Russian arts as the history of the country's "artistic experience," including the "social and political forces" that shaped artistic creation. This slim volume tackles an overwhelming subject: 1,000 years of Russian achievements in the arts, from medieval ikons to the novels of Tolstoy to the films of Eisenstein. S/t: The Story of a Thousand Years of Artistic Life in Russia