This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War (Vintage Civil War Library)
by Drew Gilpin Faust
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Book Summary Information
Author: Drew Gilpin FaustEdition: Paperback
Audio: English (Original Language); English (Unknown); English (Published)
Published: 2009-01-06
ISBN: 0375703837
Number of pages: 368
Publisher: Vintage
Product features:
- ISBN13: 9780375703836
- Condition: NEW
- Notes: Brand New from Publisher. No Remainder Mark.
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Book Reviews of This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War (Vintage Civil War Library)
Book Review: A New Look at the American Civil War
Summary: 4 Stars
I have read this book twice. I read it last year, shortly after it came out. I selected it for our quarterly book club meeting and read it again, this time more critically.
I think this is an excellent book. It is well-written, well-organized and does something I would have thought impossible. It offers a new way of looking at a very overworked subject--the American Civil War. I will not resummarize the book since so many other reviewers have already done that. But Dr. Faust gives great insight into how the Civil War affected our nation, and her style converts an otherwise morbid subject into a very interesting one. This book comes alive with the many anecdotes that put a human face on the effects of death on the soldiers and their families. I think Dr. Faust's use of anecdotes is the book's greatest strength.
But the greatest strength may also be its hidden weakness. While anecdotes put a human face on this subject, it might be misleading to extrapolate from individual experiences to the national psyche. The records of individual experiences come from diaries and letters that have survived and from books published later by those who experienced the war. Almost by definition that record focuses on the privileged classes. It is unlikely that many in the lower classes would have found the leisure time to keep a diary and less likely that their offspring would have preserved it. Only the educated would have the ability to publish a book on their experiences. In fairness, Dr. Faust does quote from letters with homemade spelling, indicating that those authors came from a background that did not offer significant education opportunities. But I would think that the percentage of letters from those people that still exist would be low and not in proportion to their share of the population. So I am concerned that the anecdotes, which give such a human face to this book, may not really represent the face of the nation.
I will say that the members of my book club did not like this book nearly as much as I did. Many of them found it repetitive. I did not. I think that conclusion may be based on whether the reader is enjoying the book. Dr. Faust comes back frequently to the same anecdotes, but to make different points. I was enjoying the book and did not find it repetitious when the anecdotes kept coming back.
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Summary of This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War (Vintage Civil War Library)
More than 600,000 soldiers lost their lives in the American Civil War. An equivalent proportion of today's population would be six million. In This Republic of Suffering, Drew Gilpin Faust reveals the ways that death on such a scale changed not only individual lives but the life of the nation, describing how the survivors managed on a practical level and how a deeply religious culture struggled to reconcile the unprecedented carnage with its belief in a benevolent God. Throughout, the voices of soldiers and their families, of statesmen, generals, preachers, poets, surgeons, nurses, northerners and southerners come together to give us a vivid understanding of the Civil War's most fundamental and widely shared reality.General Books
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