[If Jakes's "North and South"], first of a projected historical trilogy dealing with events before, during and after the American Civil War, follows the example of his eight-book Kent Family Chronicles, it will be a major bestseller. There's reason to think it will. To compare it to Thomas Keneally's recent "Confederates" would be to compare homespun to silk; but Jakes's tale belongs essentially to robust melodrama, where subtleties of style or characterization are not required. His villains are so villainous you love to hate them, his women wild and passionate (mostly), his action fast and often lurid. The story focuses on two families, the Southern Mains, slave-owning aristocrats, and the Pennsylvania Hazards, industrialists…. [The] families, over a 20-year span, become inextricably bound together by ties of both love and hate as the nation creeps towards civil war. Robert E. Lee, Lincoln, John Brown and other famous figures make...