Not bad books by any means (I haven't read them all, but their online synopses seem pretty solid), but there's far too little here about the antebellum period as a means to really understanding the causes of the war. The only real explanation of the sectional crisis (especially the history of the North) that I'd expect from that list is McPherson's first chapter or two, and that's not nearly enough.

If the list must be 5 books, and I have to replace something, I'd probably get rid of the biographies. McPherson covers enough of the military stuff anyway, and this doesn't seem to be a military history list.

I'd replace them with Bruce Levine's Half Slave and Half Free, which is a very readable overview of how the North and South developed into disparate cultures prone to sectionalism, and Mike Morrison's Slavery and the American West, which is a great look at how disagreements over the West created the sectional crisis.

If we insist on having a biographical in there, I'd trade Morrison with David Donald's Lincoln or Allen Guelzo's Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation.

Numbers 4 and 5 seem to cover the nature of antebellum slavery while injecting both black and women's voices into the story, though I might replace Douglas with something a little more general, like Walter Johnson's Soul by Soul: Life inside the Antebellum Slave Market.

Of course, there are enough good books out there that we could debate this endlessly.

Hard not to echo what others have said here. McPherson is a phenomenal choice, as it really is just the single volume history of the war, so it deserves to be in any list, but the rest? Nothing against 'em, but I would disagree for various reasons. A biography of Grant seems like a very short sighted inclusion if you are trying to make a "Five essentials" list, and while "Reading the Man" is quite a new look at Lee, again, why are we wasting space on biographies here? Same with Douglass! I haven't read "Out of the House of Bondage" so I can't really make a hard stand on it, so maybe I would say leave that, even though there are other options out there for similar coverage.

So what would I offer as an alternative list? Well... I'm going to cheat, and offer more than five, but instead focus on the five aspects that I think any given list should cover.

1. A really solid general history of the war. This is the backbone of any list like this, and this is the one case where I not only will agree with Coates, but go so far as to say there is no other option I'd want to consider other than McPherson.
2. Something that covers the road to war and secession. I'm a real fan of "Apostles of Disunion" by Dew, for that, but it is somewhat narrow in scope compared to something like Freehling's "The Road to Disunion". although then we hit the "that is actual a really long duology, not a single book" problem. /u/Borimi's suggestion of "Half Free, Half Slave" also would fit well here.
3. A book that looks at the post-war historiography, especially of the Lost Cause, and the enduring political ramifications of the war. I have written quite the list of books that cover this before, but if we had to go with one option, Foster's "Ghosts of the Confederacy", Blight's "Race and Reunion", Janney's "Remembering the Civil War", or Wilson's "Baptized in Blood" are all options to consider.
4. Something that is focused specifically on slavery. As I said, I can't speak to "Out of the House of Bondage" but it would fit here. Otherwise, I still haven't gotten to it, but I've been hearing really good things about "The Half Has Never Been Told" which /u/rocketsocks brought up, but some other possibilities would be "Master of Small Worlds" by McCurry, "Roll, Jordan, Roll" by Genovese (I'm joking /u/freedmenspatrol!), "Within the Plantation Household" by Fox-Genovese, "Ruling Race" by Oakes... several more options beyond that, and I don't really want to say "that's the one" but I think you get the point. One of the five needs to be about slavery in the South.
5. I have one spot left I'm split on whether to spend spot the final on something like Foner's "Reconstruction", which is a solid topic to cover (and definitely the book to pick for it) here looking at the immediate post-war world, or instead to include a book like "Southern Storm" by Trudeau, since I don't really want to waste a spot on what is essentially a military history (McPherson is enough there), but on the other hand Sherman's March is such a core part of the conventional wisdom of the conflict, that Trudeau's take would likely be eye-opening for many. Although I guess on that qualification I could of course also justify bringing back "Reading the Man". All in all I like the symmetry of Foner, since it creates something of a temporal progression here, since you could then read all five works as almost a narrative structure (4,2,1,5,3 being the order though...), so I'm leaning that way...

To echo /u/Borimi's comments, these seem a bit heavy on biographies, although Frederick Douglas' is a good one in this case because it provides some very personalized examples of what slavery was like.

The core problem with this list is that it doesn't sufficiently contextualize the civil war and the practice of slavery and the racial caste system in relation to the American experience (for the enslaved, the slavers, for those who otherwise benefited from slavery, and for those who wanted to get rid of it). It also doesn't place the civil war and the fight over slavery and its abolition in the larger historical context. Lincoln is one of the most famous historical figures because he "won" the civil war and because he pushed for abolition as part of that victory. However, president Rutherford B. Hayes is comparatively almost unknown in the popular culture, though he can be said to have "unwon" the civil war substantially, at least in regards to the issue of abolition of slavery and the extension of the full rights and freedoms granted by the US constitution to all of its citizens, regardless of race. I think to rightly address the history of the civil war and to become "less stupid about it" would require understanding more of the history of race and especially of slavery in the US both before and after the civil war, likely all the way up to the civil rights era, if not through to today.

I would add a book about reconstruction, a book about jim crow, a book about the great migration and its causes, a book about the civil rights era, and probably a book that studied the practice of slavery with a more broad based approach than, say, a single slave narrative (as valuable as such narratives can be).

As a preliminary list, I'd suggest these to replace some of Coates' selections:

• Reconstruction by Eric Foner
• The Half Has Never Been Told by Edward E. Baptist
• The Warmth of Other Suns by Isabel Wilkerson