This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War | Drew Gilpin Faust

This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War | Drew Gilpin Faust | Death and the Civil War

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This Republic of S...

	This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War Drew Gilpin Faust Knopf, 2008 - 368 pages average customer review:based on 54 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

A Very Moving History of Our Country's First Experience with Massive Death

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.

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Death and the Civil War

A beautifully written and conceived book. The author approaches the United States and civil war from the perspective of death; a perspective I have never seen addressed. Fascinating in her descriptions of a "good death" and in the stress, grieving and emotional toil knowing or not knowing, finding or not finding a deceased beloved, burying or not burying, had on the families and loved ones of soldiers who fought and died in the Civil War.

While the author does not make the conceptual or "time" leap to the present, the issues and themes are relevent for those who served, and their famiies, in Viet Nam, Iraq and other conflicts.

I was especially moved by the author's purposely emphasizing that one death has meaning, one death communuictes, one death can be devistating, even as she recounts the tens and tens of thousands who died, and what this mass killing and dying meant for the American psyche.

Anyone interested in the Civil War will learn from this book.

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Giving Life to Death

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. Ms. Faust sets the stage by highlighting two facts often given short shrift in discussions of the war's carnage: both sides' shock when they realized that the it likely would last years and not the months many had anticipated, exacting many more casualties than anyone anticipated, and that these deaths were not taking place on some foreign field where their impact was at least to some extent softened by the distance, but rather in a neighbor's field and sometimes literally on one's doorstep. On a more prosaic level, I would bet I'm not alone in never having pondered how the Civil War dead were identified or otherwise accounted for before the inroduction of "dog tags", how their remains were disposed of, whether an effort was made to return them to their homes, etc. Well, Ms. Faust certainly has 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.

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Almost a great book

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?

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War's Brutality

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.

reviews: 1, page 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11

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