SOURCE: "Berton's Judgements on the Horror of War," in Quill & Quire, Vol. 47, No. 10, October, 1981, p. 33.

In the following review, Woodcock claims that Berton has "passed the test for good history writing" by providing a "richer, deeper, and … truer" view of the War of 1812.

The real shape or intent of a book is never truly revealed to us until we have read the last chapter or, in longer works, the final volume. And it is near the end of Flames Across the Border, 1813–1814, the second part of his account of the War of 1812, that one really recognizes what differentiates Pierre Berton's kind of history from the works of most academic historians. It is not merely the intense populism of Berton's approach, though the small people are here again in their dozens, the private soldiers, the women defending their possessions, the anonymous farmers gratuitously killed, the Indians who are faceless...