This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War by Drew Gilpin Faust
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Book Reviews of This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War
Book Review: Almost a great book
Summary: 4 Stars
Academic. Readable. Redundant in places. Should have been longer in some ways, and shorter in others.
My primary disappointment was to finish the book with no perspective on how our American way of coping with death in the latter half of the 19th century fit with the European world. Was the concept of "a good death" peculiarly American? Did the Germans or English or French have systems for recovering battlefield corpses and notifying kin? Were the Eurpopean's horrified by the Civil War? Were our death rates for this war unusual compared to European wars? Why did Maine have a population larger than Connecticut in 1860? Was our civilian army unusual?
But it was an excellent book, and Ms. Gilpin should be commended for writing this social history on an under-examined topic. I think adding illustrations to it of folk-art responses to death would have been interesting - perhaps a companion volume?
Book Review: Giving Life to Death
Summary: 5 Stars
Readers of Civil War histories will inevitably come across the gruesome death statistics which are shocking even today after the wholesale bloodletting of the two world wars. What they won't come across, at least in my experience, is a thoughtful examination of the meaning and long-term implications of those statistics, at least until now in this wonderful examination of the subject. I would bet I'm not alone in never having pondered how the Civil War dead were buried, identified or otherwise accounted for, how both those involved and non-combatants viewed the carnage, and similarly recondite questions. Well, Ms. Faust has certainly done so and has produced a reasonably brief but obviously deeply considered volume which I believe will hereafter become an essential adjunct to a thorough understanding of the war and its consequences for the country. Book Review: War's Brutality
Summary: 3 Stars
This book repudiates any romantic or sentimental view of the Civil War one may hold. It was a truly gruesome affair. I give the book three stars for dull prose and the introductory chapter seeming more like a conclusion. Faust was best when synthesizing primary materials - letters home, statistics, muster rolls... She seems to have been inspired, at least in part, by Tony Horwitz's Confederates in the Attic - a much better read ultimately.Book Review: A Very Moving History of Our Country's First Experience with Massive Death
Summary: 5 Stars
This is a profoundly moving book about America's first real experience with the massive death that war can cause. At the time, America did not know how to deal with the overwhelming death rate and the resulting confusions with burial, identification and keeping basic statistics. Sometimes it was years before families received any kind of closure on the death of their sons, brothers, fathers, and other relatives. Dr Drew Faust of Harvard has done an outstanding presentation of the era and the role of the religions, in particular, Spiritualism. Spiritualism, with its promise of reunion on the other side and continuous life had some of its greatest moments during this time. I found the chapter on COUNTING to be of particular interest. It reminded me of my research on the HOLOCAUST, where I had to remember that numbers are not just statistics, but records of the unrealized potentials of individual souls. Dr. Faust had created a beautifully written record of an uninvestigated part of our history.Book Review: More like a collection of essays or a survey
Summary: 3 Stars
than a flowing narrative about this overlooked topic. While many of the writer's statistics are informative and much information has been gathered little attempt was made to construct a compelling book or to draw wider conclusions from the data presented. I would like to see a book centering on deaths in one army or one regiment even and how those experiences reflected themes in the Civil War rather than this authors style of stitching together a series of essays on different topics related to death in the CW. The reader is left sifting through alot of vignettes about lost soldiers, grieving wives etc...