If you like the poetry of language in books, I’d also highly recommend anything by Bruce Catton. His best work, naturally, is about the Civil War, but he also visited other historical periods, too. Clever use of sentence length (slow, long sentences to describe the beginning of Pickett’s Charge changing to short, sharp sentences as it reached its desperate climax) phrasing, and a very dry wit (“the volunteers just thought they were exercising their constitutional rights, not committing mutiny, but if the major general commanding felt differently, what with all the regulars he had with him...”) combine for a top-notch read.