The Whirlwind of War is the second book in Stephen B. Oates's Voices of the Storm trilogy, which began with The Approaching Fury. The Whirlwind of War builds on the great themes and follows many of the important figures that were introduced in The Approaching Fury.

Oates brings his moving narrative of the complex, bloody, and destructive war to life by writing in the first person, impersonating the voices and assuming the viewpoints of several of the principal figures: the rival presidents, Abraham Lincoln and Jefferson Davis; the rival generals, Robert E. Lee, Ulysses S.

Grant, and William Tecumseh Sherman; the great black abolitionist, editor, and orator, Frederick Douglass; the young Union battlefield nurse, Cornelia Hancock; the brilliant head of the Chicago Sanitary Commission and cocreator of the northern Sanitary Fair, Mary Livermore; the Confederate socialite and political insider, Mary Boykin Chesnut; the assassin, John Wilkes Booth; and the greatest poet of the era, Walt Whitman, who speaks in the coda about the meaning of war and Lincoln's death.