About this title: The president of Harvard University presents this innovative study of the American struggle to comprehend the meaning and consequences of death in the face of the unprecedented slaughter of the Civil War. 56 illustrations.
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Description: FINE. Superb, crisp, clean, unread hardcover with some light shelfwear to the dust jacket and a remainder mark to one edge-VERY NICE! read more
Edition: First edition.
Binding: Trade paperback
Publisher: Vintage Books USA
Date Published: 2009
ISBN-13:9780375703836ISBN:0375703837
Description: Very good. No dust jacket as issued. Tiny tears/dents on edge of some pgs, lite soil on edge, else fine. Stated 1st paperback edition. Trade paperback (US). Glued binding. 346 p. Contains: Illustrations. Vintage Civil War Library. Audience: General/trade. read more
Binding: Softcover
Publisher: Vintage Books
Date Published: 2009-01-06
ISBN-13:9780375703836ISBN:0375703837
Description: NEW. Softcover. From an inventory that is 100% brand-new, 100% direct from the publishers' distribution channel. We carry NO pre-owned, NO remaindered. We pack in CARDBOARD to ensure the pristine quality is maintained. (Bubble-wrap alone is NOT sufficient to protect from USPS equipment. ) Guaranteed brand-NEW, protected with CARDBOARD, your satisfaction is guaranteed. BKLUVID: 9780375703836. read more
Binding: Paperback
Publisher: Vintage
Date Published: 2009
ISBN-13:9780375703836ISBN:0375703837
Description: New. Brand New! Buy with confidence-your satisfaction is guaranteed at B-Logistics! Due to the large scale of our operation, we do not have access to the specific contents/condition of our items. Please note that Expedited shipping is not available at this time. read more
Edition: Tenth Printing
Binding: Red Boards
Publisher: Alfred A Knopf Inc, New York, New York, U.S.A.
Date Published: 2008
ISBN-13:9780375404047ISBN:037540404X
Description: Very Good in Very Good Price Intact jacket. 9 1/2 X 6 1/2. Pages are tight, bright & clean. Jacket in a crystal-clear polyester protector sleeve. Binding very firm and straight. Boards, spine, edges and corners good+. 346 pages, epilogue, notes, acknowledgments, & indexed. If needed for reference, research, lucubrations or just enjoyment this is the one. B/W illustrations. read more
Edition: Book Club Edition.
Binding: Hardcover
Publisher: Knopf Publishing Group
Date Published: 2008
ISBN-13:9780375404047ISBN:037540404X
Description: New in new dust jacket. Glued binding. Paper over boards. With dust jacket. 346 p. Contains: Illustrations. Audience: General/trade. BRAND NEW NEVER OPENED read more
"Reading "This Republic of Suffering" I was reminded of a quote by UCLA sociology professor Peter Kollock: "A group of people facing a social dilemma may completely understand the situation, may appreciate how each of their actions contributes to a disastrous outcome, and still be unable to do anything about it."
The most striking fact about the American Civil War is how poorly the future combatants understood how their actions would create an outcome incredibly more disastrous than they imagined. A Confederate chaplain told South Carolina Senator James Chesnut the country was "at the beginning of a terrible war." "Not at all," he replied. "There will be no war. It will be all arranged. I will drink all the blood shed in the war."
Particularly for those of us who have ancestors who died in the war, this book is an engaging examination of the horrific unintended consequences of a conflict that, once started, ran a terrible course of its own."
"This book has started off a bit slow and I wondered if it was going to have enough information for the length of the book. I worried if it would get redundant. But it got much more interesting as time went on.
The books discusses several topics related to death and the war, including the role religion and the contemporary view on heaven factored into citizen's willingness to accept the high death toll. It also goes into the emergence of graves details, the difficulty of compiling accurate records on death, and the lack of a systematic effort by the military to record deaths and identities of the fallen. It also talks about the role of citizen groups, including an effort by Clara Barton, after the war, to identify, re-inter and notify families who may have never heard about the fate of their fathers, husbands and sons. It explores a different part of the war and brings up topics that you may never have considered."
"In This Republic of Suffering historian and Harvard University President Drew Gilpin Faust explains how the mass casualties of the Civil War forced Americans to re-examine and radically alter their attitudes toward death.
Pre-Civil-War Americans sought "The Good Death" - to die at home, surrounded by family, prepared and at peace, fully confident of the life to come, and buried in a family plot or familiar local churchyard. The Good Death was obviously impossible for the hundreds of thousands of soldiers who fell in the war. Many were buried in makeshift graves near battlefields hundreds of miles from home. Others were simply left where they fell, to be picked at by scavenging animals and, eventually, to rot away.
There was no official apparatus for notifying families that their loved ones had been lost. Families often learned of the fate of their sons, brothers, husbands from letters from comrades. Sometimes the letters home from their distant soldiers just stopped.
The mass carnage led many to begin to question their deeply-held belief in a benevolent diety. Others turned to spiritualism in an attempt to contact their lost on The Other Side.
After the war's end there was a growing acknowledgment of the country's and the Government's obligation to the dead. The military rituals and honors for those killed in the line of duty that we take for granted today - notification of next of kin, graves registration - were simply non-exisitent prior to this time. Faust describes the grisly and harrowing post-war efforts to identify and gather together the dead from thousands of sites for reinterment in newly established national cemeteries. The disparity in the handling of the Union and Confederate dead - efforts to identify the South's dead were left entirely in private hands - led to a reinforcement of Southern nationalism.
Faust writes wonderfully but many of the most poignant passages in the book come from the letters of soldiers and survivors which she cites extensively. She discusses the impact that the war's carnage had on American writers like Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson, Ambrose Bierce and Herman Melville.
In the end, Faust says, 'We still live in the world of death the Civil War created..... Even as the Civil War brought new humanity ... in the management of death, so too it introduced a new level of carnage that foreshadowed the wars of the century to come." A heartbreaking but strangely wonderful book."
"a very interesting topic and for the most part well done. The author looks at how the civil war changed american consciousness about death, in pracitcal ways from how people grieved to economic ways, how it caused the budding practice of enbalming to take off, to administrative- how it caused the government to start to keep track and take care of it's soldiers, and not just officers, to the religious, whenre it made amass movement of the spiritual conception of death as just being a little blip transition between living and a slightly different type of life. The book gets bogged down in too many details. A few times I fell asleep at nioght and the next day did not bother rewinding because she was writing about almost exactly the same thing, just a different instance.
I think it was too long, andthat blunted some fo the power, but the ideas in it are all very interesting especially regarding how the war and the unpresedented amount of death shaped the country and the culture in new ways"
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