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?

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.

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.

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.

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...

I love to read. I love history. The civil war has always fascinated me. Lincoln history is especially interesting to me. All that said, this is one of the hardest books to read on the civil war that I have tried reading. Its not TECHNICALLY difficult. The vocabulary is not difficult. It just seems to spend a lot of time saying the same things, with a great redundancy on examples. I can usually read a book this size in a week or two, but I have been gnawing at this one for a couple months now. I still give it three stars because what it does say is a new and interesting side of the civil war. It just could have been said better?

"The Republic of Suffering" began with a focus on death and dying in the Civil War for the soldiers, their families, and civilians. It put forth some interesting commentary on the Victorian concept of the "good death" and how it influenced the soldiers' preparation for and acceptance of their fate. The text offered insight into the minds and attitudes of the time as well as some traditions and practices not explicitly discussed in detail in other CW books.

Halfway through, the author seemed to leave the battlefield and meander off into a history of the mortuary business and short bios and commentary of late 19th century authors like Dickenson and Melville. I found the chapters "Accounting" and "Numbering", which discussed the bureaucracy of death from the military and government perspective, dry and disjointed. That's not to say there weren't points of interest, but the second half of the book just could not keep my attention on an ongoing basis.

The reader will come away disturbed by the detail on the carnage and the paucity of information available to the families fretting over loved ones fighting the battles. They will also gain knowledge of the influence the war had on shaping the modern practices of handling death. "The Republic of Suffering" has its place in augmenting one's understanding of the Civil War. I struggled between three and four stars and would have given a three-and-a-half if I could have.

Ms Gilpin Faust speaks with the authority of a published Historian on a topic of interist to all American citizens; Death and the Civil War, or The War Between the States.

She accurately compiles the hundreds of thousans of those killed in battle, those who died of disease, and those 50,ooo civilians cought in the crossfire.

It is a compelling,informative, disturbing read. We are taken through endless search for the discovery of the dead of the hastily buried in a shallow grave, or those left to compose on the ground of a past battle.

It took me fifty years to reseaerch the details of my uncle Byron, KIA in France in Augist, 1918. His mother, father, and brother did not learn of his death until October, 1918. His third burial was not until January of 1921 in Oaklawn Cemetary in Sturgis, Michigan. Fifty some pages of correspondence were necessary to cover his end from the tellegram from The War Department to the receipt by my grandparents of the 10,00 dollar insurance policy. Ida and Will, and his only brother gained a measure of cloture.

Gilpin Faust makes the reader feel the hopless desparate search of family for their missing son, brother, sister, , husband, wife, mother or father.

The reader is shown the need and origins of Decoration Day, and the decades long struggle to make the accounting of war dead as complete as possible.

The reader needs to rest between chapters and think about the realities visited in our terrible Civil Wa; then resume the task of completing our reading of the chapters of This Republic of Suffering, and resolve to do our part to keep our Nation out of civil wars.

Gilpin Faust has made a terrible time in American History come to a measure of closure. All Americans should read her book.

Harery Wenzel

No other war scrificed so many of our young men as did our Civil War. Our author deals with death in the Civil War. He addresses the number of deaths, death and disease, burial and unmarked graves, and the after effects from combat, being shot at and shooting another person. If you have visited Vicksburg's Nation Cemetery you know that fourteen thousand of the seventeen thousand buried there are unknown. This is a most interesting book. If you are interested in history this is a good one. By Ruth Thompson author of The Bluegrass Dream" and "Natchez Above the River"

Writing as a Small BusinessQualifying Laps: A Brewster County NovelSins of the Fathers: A Brewster County NovelTravelersThe Bluegrass Dream: A Wilderness Adventure of Early SettlersNatchez Above The River: A Family's Survival In The Civil War

No other war scrificed so many of our young men as did our Civil War. Our author deals with death in the Civil War. He addresses the numbers, death and disease, burial and unmarked graves, and the after effects from combat, being shot at and shooting another person. If you have visited Vicksburg's Nation Cemetery you know that fourteen thousand of the seventeen thousand buried there are unknown. This is a most interesting book. If you are interested in history this is a good one. By Ruth Thompson author of The Bluegrass Dream" and "Natchez Above the River"

Writing as a Small BusinessQualifying Laps: A Brewster County NovelSins of the Fathers: A Brewster County NovelTravelersThe Bluegrass Dream: A Wilderness Adventure of Early SettlersNatchez Above The River: A Family's Survival In The Civil War

This book has a lot of quotes from Civil War soldiers and the imagery is spectacular. It is one of the best books on the Civil War I have read. Makes the war real.

The Specter of Death touched all and changed the nation
Dr. Drew Faust's The Republic of Suffering is an academic work that attempts to analyze how the horrific amount of death in the Civil War affected both the individuals involved, the genera noncombatant citizenry, and the nation as a whole. With so much death and misery everywhere, how did the nation come to grips with so much suffering? Never was the magnitude of the Civil War imagined when war broke out in 1861. Most in the North and South thought it would be a relatively quick "little war", with each siding predicting easy victory. Sadly, this proved not the case. By the horrific battle at Antietam, the reality of the misery began to sink in. Death hovered over the split nation and touched every household. The pre-war notions of the "good death" was challenged by the utter magnitude of the battles. Bodies piled on bodies and simply overwhelmed the sensibilities of those that survived. General Robert E. Lee eloquently summed it up at the death of General A.P. Hill, "He is at rest now, and we who are left are the ones to suffer."

I applaud Dr. Faust's excellent in-depth work. Although tedious at times, it represents an excellent scholarly work. To understand the true magnitude of America's most consuming conflict, one must understand the overwhelming suffering that everyone alive at the time went through. Whether soldier, citizen, child, slave, politician, government bureaucrats, or foreign visitor, all had to deal with the stench of death on equal footing. Only the dead were at peace, the living had to continue on and grapple with the debris of war. The Civil War was more than just battles and soldiers fighting. It was more than a clash of ideologies. It was more than ending slavery and a way of life. It was a seminal moment in our history, and like all seminal moments it was gut-wrenching. America would never again be the same and view the glory of war in the same way. Death and suffering took on new meaning. Even the most chivalrous of soldiers became savage gentlemen as they engaged in a new type of total warfare. The sheer immensity of it all simply could not have been imagined, and once experienced, change the nation forever. Death visited every doorstep and suffering was every man's shadow. America was changed forever . It was for future generations to determine if for the better, as those that lived through it suffered mightily and wept for the fallen and the lost of America naiveté.

Recommended for those interested in more than Civil War battles, strategies, and tactics. It is not a quick read but requires the reader to plough through a well written and well researched academic work.

I'm almost ashamed to say this, but I was hoping that "This Republic of Suffering" would provide the gory details missing from typical Civil War accounts that focus on battle strategies or glorify the "noble sacrifice" made by the soldiers. Author Drew Gilpin Faust, president of Harvard, has covered all the bases in dealing with the nation's reaction to the unprecedented volume death caused by the war. But she has not done as well in conveying viscerally the details that traumatized the Civil War generation and provided them some motivation to veil the horror of war. I found this to be unsatisfactory from a purely historical basis. I also thought it was ironic that 140+ years after the events, we still shy away from the realities of fratricidal combat.

Faust's basic thesis seems sound enough. In the mid-nineteenth century, Victorians were obsessed with the idea of "the Good Death" -- one in which the dying were surrounded by loved ones and had the opportunity to consciously affirm their impending fate and their belief in their eventual arrival in Heaven. Faust documents this thesis by dissecting the letters of soldiers -- dying and facing death -- and their comrades, who toiled mightily in post-mortem letters to comfort families with tales of the lost one's battlefield bravery, acceptance of death and expressions of piety. What fascinated is how these writers, with every reason in the world to tell comforting lies, sought to keep their death-bed tales within the realm of the truth. A soldier who showed no overt religiosity might be lauded instead for bravery that showed love of country. And perhaps by extension a Christian love of neighbor.

Faust details the way families dealt with death -- by seeking bodily preservation and transport from the newly-founded embalming industry. She also describes the lengths to which the government and private individuals sought to locate and identify remains, providing the comfort, at least, of a grave over which to mourn. The sheer volume of the task -- in which literally millions of pounds of flesh (horse and human) remained putrefying for days and weeks and even years after battles -- showed how brutal was this war, how daunting the task of recovering the dead and how naive the nation about the ghastliness of modern warfare.

The focus of "This Republic of Suffering" is mostly intellectual, which as I suggested is unfortunate. The emotional component, one that describes the harrowing details of dealing with death on such a massive scale, is missing. But it is instructive and perhaps ironic to watch a nation simultaneously tear itself to pieces and guiltily attempt to reassemble, repatriate and otherwise honor the butchered dead. "This Republic of Suffering" shows how our nation, during one spasm of self-lacerating violence, recoiled from the horror in ways that emerged from the era's value system and sense of self.

Americans of the present day, who are generally appalled when battlefield deaths reach even double-digit proportions, have almost no real comprehension of the tremendous loss of life suffered during the American Civil War. Because it all happened almost 150 years ago, it is easy for most to simply gloss over even a number as large as the 620,000 total deaths usually attributed to that war. That kind of number just does not have an impact on most of us because we find it difficult to put it into its proper perspective. Readers of Drew Gilpin Faust's This Republic of Suffering will never make that mistake again.

Those who lived through the bloody days of 1861-1865 were almost overwhelmed by the magnitude of their losses. In addition to the estimated 620,000 soldiers who lost their lives during that four-year span, approximately 50,000 civilians died as well. All told, the United States lost about 2 percent of its population in less than half a decade of civil war, the equivalent of a 6,000,000 person loss if today's population were to suffer a similar rate of attrition. There was hardly a family in the country not impacted by the horrors of this war so it is little wonder that the country struggled to understand what was happening to it.

Faust details what it was like for small towns near the fighting when the townspeople could suddenly find the dead bodies scattered on adjacent fields to outnumber the townspeople themselves. She explains what it was like for the several hundred thousand families whose fathers and sons became part of the vast number of "unknowns" buried in unmarked or mass graves, lost to them forever. Equally importantly, Faust places human faces on those who struggled not only to cope personally with so much death but to create the very procedures modern Americans expect their government to use today in order to fully account for every soldier who has paid the ultimate price in service to this country. One cannot read this book without coming away with a new respect for the Civil War generation.

The best coping mechanism available to nineteenth century Americans was the concept of the Good Death. Parents and spouses were greatly comforted if able to determine that their loved ones had died a Good Death, one in which they were able to express an awareness and acceptance of their fate, a belief in God, and some message for those who were unable to be at their side when they died. Soldiers and hospital workers did their best to inform families back home that this was the case for those lost in the war but almost 50 percent of those who died were never identified, leaving families wondering for years.

Faust points out an interesting side effect of the widespread acceptance of the Good Death concept. In her estimation, although the religious concept of a Good Death offered comfort to mourners and helped prepare soldiers for the likelihood of their own deaths, the concept was also one of the things that "enabled the slaughter" in the first place. Soldiers, confident in their individual mortality, were more willing to face death both as a fulfillment of their duty and as a potential relief from the tortures they were enduring on a daily basis.
In the years following the war, the United States government, in response to the feelings of its citizens, formalized many of the procedures to handle soldiers lost at war that are still in place today. A system of national cemeteries was established and the government spent slightly over $4 million by 1871 to locate and rebury every Union soldier who had been lost in the South. Formal procedures were established in the military to account for every soldier lost on the field of battle and to notify next-of-kin in a timely manner. Military pensions and disability payments became the excepted way for the government to reward soldiers for their service. That none of this was in place before the Civil War illustrates just how unprepared the country was for a war of the magnitude of the one it faced in April 1861.

Of course, the new procedures were solely for the benefit of Union soldiers. Confederate bones were often left in the field to rot even after the bodies of Union soldiers had been recovered, ensuring that southerners would have to bury and honor their own dead through the use of private funds (most often raised by southern women), insuring the animosity of the South for decades after the war. The contempt shown by the Federal government for the soldiers of the South reinforced the hostility still present there and contributed to the sectionalism problems that persisted into the twentieth century.

This Republic of Suffering is more than a book for historians and Civil War buffs. This is a book with lessons for a country that even today finds itself in another long and challenging war.

I enjoyed this book, but found it sad.It gives a good understanding of the truama that Americans went through during the Civil War.The South was especially traumatized for many reasons.

This book is fascinating as an insight into the forces that produced the United States; a federation which holds together as a country.

Harvard President Drew Faust's marvelous new book, "This Republic of Suffering," explains how the nation tried to make sense of the Civil War. It was, by all measures, a nearly impossible task that required every social and spiritual tool available -- silent prayer, civic religion, séances, philosophy, the visual arts, mortuary science, pulp journalism, public grieving, new forms of group fellowship and even government bureaucracy.

Much of Faust's book is devoted to the nation's spiritual response. In other words, how Christian America applied its 19th century concepts of "the Good Death" and domesticity to the unbelievable carnage of the war, which as first seemed to make a mockery of those very same ideals. We learn, for instance, how publishers printed customized memorial posters of missing solders so that family members (without a corpse or grave to visit) could at least have something tangible to grieve over.

Another example of this massive cultural adaptation was the founding of national cemeteries throughout the South to provide a "proper resting place" for the Union dead. (Confederate bodies were not allowed in, at least in most cases.) As Faust explains, just counting, collecting and reburying the dead took years of struggle -- not to mention the massive psychic toll on the burial teams (usually Black men) and families of the lost.

Every corner of American society was affected by this process of "coming to terms," including the burgeoning field of creative literature. After the assassination of Abraham Lincoln, Walt Whitman wrote "When Lilacs Last in the Door-Yard Bloom'd" -- one of the most powerful poems of the 19th century. (It's featured prominently in Faust's book.) Whitman grieved not just for the fallen president but also for the 620,000+ soldiers who died far from home. One part of the poem reads:

"Then with the knowledge of death as walking one side of me,
And the thought of death close-walking the other side of me,
And I in the middle, as with companions,
and as holding the hands of companions,
I fled forth to the hiding receiving night, that talks not,
Down to the shores of the water, the path by the swamp in the dimness,
To the solemn shadowy cedars, and ghostly pines so still...

O how shall I warble myself for the dead one there I loved?
And how shall I deck my song for the large sweet soul that has gone?
And what shall my perfume be, for the grave of him I love?"

Today, 143 years later, we are still grieving. As I look out my window across downtown Battle Creek, Michigan, I can see a bronze Civil War memorial statue weeping alone in the cool morning mist of early April.

"Dulce et decorum est
Pro patria mori"

(Or so we once believed...)

It is really hard to put this book into a category. In an unusual approach to an almost unknown aspect of the Civil War, the author has given us a book dealing exclusively with the subject of death during that conflict. That may seem odd and ghoulish, but the book is actually extremely well-written, and tells the reader many things that he or she has not thought about before when consdidering this war. We have chapters on finding the dead, burying the dead, numbering the dead, seeking a lost family member on the battlefield, and also establishing national cemeteries for the dead. This subject would, at first glance, appear to be exceedingly dull and boring, but it is not, and the reader follows chapter after chapter, learning numerous things not even considered before opening this book. This is well done, and it gives us more insight into the world and the people of that conflict, now a century and a half in the past.

Most books on the American Civil War can be grouped into one of two categories. The first category consists of studies of the military history of the conflict, frequently focusing on individual battles or campaigns. The second category focuses on the political aspects of the conflict with much recent literature centered upon Emancipation and with the long delay following the Civil War in securing civil rights for the former slaves.

Drew Gilpin Faust's "This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War" cuts across these two categories by studying in detail the extent of the death and suffering resulting from America's greatest conflict. Most studies of the Civil War, of the first or second category, do pay attention to Civil War death but in the context of other themes. There are relatively few studies which take death as the primary theme for a study of the entire War. (Faust has good precedent for her theme in Gregory Coco's "A Strange and Blighted Land" and other works by Coco, among other writers, of the aftermath of the Battle of Gettysburg).

Faust emphasizes the strongly religious and evangelical character of mid-19th Century United States and of the familiarity that society, in contrast to how many people view contemporary America, felt with death. She emphasizes the concept of the "good death" after a full life and in the presence of family, with the deceased having the opportunity to turn his thoughts towards repentance and religion. The Civil War and its carnage ran squarely into the concept of the good death as soldiers in the hundreds of thousands died from disease or bullets far from home in a manner that was depersonalizing, painful, and bleak. Casualty rates in the Civil War were extraordinarily high and difficult even today to measure precisely, especially for the South.

Faust describes how, at the outset of the war, neither the North nor the South expected a lengthy conflict and thus made no provision for handling the massive casualties that occurred. Ambulance service -- the retrieval of the dead and wounded -- medical care, identification of the dead, proper burial, and the notification of kin were all seriously deficient. Faust describes these and many other aspects of death and of the brutality of the conflict and of the efforts made, as the War dragged on, to improve the care given to the dead and dying.

Faust is insightful on the efforts of non-government groups, such as the U.S. Sanitary Commission and the Christian Commission, and of individuals such as Clara Barton, to relieve suffering during the war and to treat each soldier as a treasured individual rather than as a cog in the military effort. Similar efforts were made on a smaller scale in the South. She also describes well the efforts made after the war by persons such as Edward Whitman, by the Federal government, and by women's groups in the former Confederacy to find the dead, frequently buried in hastily-constructed graves, and to identify and inter them with respect and honor. This effort, Faust argues, presaged an expansive role for the government in the theretofore private affairs of individuals and marked a change in the way the culture viewed and responded to death.

The most impressive part of the book is the use Faust makes of contemporaneous literary accounts of the Civil War. Her book is replete with references to Civil War poetry which, whatever its shortcomings may be as literature, is a precious guide to how people living through the war responded to it. In addition to the popular literature of the day, she draws upon the works of Lincoln (the Second Inaugural Address)Whitman, Melville, Ambrose Bierce, Emily Dickinson, John DeForest (author of the 1867 novel "Miss Ravenel's Conversion"), and Oliver Wendell Holmes to show how the destruction wrought by the Civil War was viewed by contemporaries.

In a recent article in the New York Review, James McPherson has pointed out that Faust's book gives insufficient weight to other important results of the Civil War over and beyond the appalling casualties. Thus she does not address the preservation of the Union and the expansion of democracy, the adoption of the 13th, 14th, and 15th amendments, and the eventual, although delayed, extension of rights of citizenship to the former slaves. She also gives insufficient weight to the manner in which the war ultimately came to reunite the North and the South which had been bitter enemies during the conflict and in the immediate years thereafter. But there will be few readers who will be tempted to romanticize the Civil War after reading Faust's account. Her study reminded me of the terrible price Americans have had to pay to secure the government and the liberties we hold dear and all too frequently take for granted.

Robin Friedman

Succinct and powerful in an easily digestable manner, even for the layperson. All the things I have wondered about the Civil War and the magnitude of its death, loss and suffering, but could not begin to imagine. A must for anyone remotely interested in the Civil War and how it affected subsequent wars and our lives today.

I have read three or four books that deal with death and the injuries that were suffered during the Civil War. I found them quite interesting and ordered this book with my free certificate from Amazon. I was very disappointed with the book. After the first few chapters it grew quite tedious and I was tempted to lay it down and move on. I have two books that were far superior to this book and I would recommend them to anyone who is interested in what happened to the dead after battle. They are "Debris of Battle", and "A Strange and Blighted Land, Gettysburg and the Aftermath of the Battle".

The heartwrenching and unvarnished truth of this work is, never again should anyone think of the Civil War as a romantic endeavor. A powerful contribution to scholarship that should be required reading in every upper level university course on American history of the 19th century.

Alan Z Aiches, Washington, DC

The Civil War meant many things to different people, but to everyone in America at the time it meant death. Mass death on an unprecedented and unimaginable scale. About three million Americans fought in the war. Approximately 620,000 of them died, a number "equal to the total American fatalities in the Revolution, the War of 1812, the Mexican War, the Spanish-American War, World War I, World War II, and the Korean War combined" (italics mine). That's a death rate of about 2% of those who fought, which today would equal about six million American dead. Over half of the Civil War Dead remain unidentified. Nor do these combatant deaths include "collateral" civilian deaths.

Drew Gilpin Faust, president of Harvard, does not merely quantify this carnage. She explores it from numerous and different angles. To each of her eight chapters she assigns a single word. Dying examines the nature of the so-called Good Death, and shows how people wondered if there could be any meaning, whether political or religious, in so much slaughter. Killing was "a problem to overcome" since human conscience, religion, reason, and culture all inhibited the idea of taking another's life. But kill they did, given sufficient rationalizations and justifications. Burying a half million bodies (and 1.5 million horses and mules) in primitive conditions seems unimaginable in retrospect, and it was, while Naming the dead shows how more than 50% of the casualties not only lost their lives but their identities. Realizing considers the practical impact of the war on non-combatant civilians, and the rites, rituals, and dress they adopted to channel their grief. Belief and Doubt turns to theodicy, where the north could at least appeal to vindication and victory while the confederate south appealed to notions of abandonment and punishment. Others like Mark Twain, Herman Melville and Emily Dickinson invoked secular and tragic irony. The final two chapters on Accounting and Numbering explore how the nation fulfilled its obligations to the dead by establishing national cemeteries and federal legislation for the Union dead, and, in the south which was ignored and neglected by the government, similar efforts by citizen groups. 303,536 Union soldiers were eventually disinterred and reburied in national cemeteries.

Faust quotes heavily from primary source material like letters, sermons, diaries, newspaper articles, advertisements, death records, grave stones, and the like. She retains their florid language, bad grammar, misspellings, and creative expressions. She does an especially good job of noting the roles played by women citizens bereft of their men and black soldiers who fought nobly. Over fifty photographs (a new technology at the time) and illustrations, along with fifty pages of footnotes, complete the book. This book is not only a work of pain-staking historical research and sober philosophic reflection; it's a fitting labor of love that honors the memory of those who died in America's deadliest war.

Drew Faust's book gave me a vivid understanding of the Civil War from a very personal perspective, from families, soldiers, nurses and many others involved with the War. It is well written and carefully documented by this brilliant historian. The author shows in a powerful way how this war changed the Nation. The Civil War Dead become a reality in this book.

Civil War historian Drew Gilpin Faust has written an informative and troubling study of how antebellum Americans adopted and shaped a 'Culture of Death' during the bewildering and staggering carnage of the Civil War.

An estimated 620,000 soldiers were shot, blown apart by cannon fire, or killed by botched battlefield operations during the years that the war raged (1861-65). As the author points out, an equivalent proportion of the current U.S. population would be six million losses. Lincoln believed that the mass killing transformed a provisional organization of states into a unified nation, but it was a bloody process that forced families to adopt new social rituals to both make sense of and work their way through all the dying.

Faust describes in intricate but highly readable detail how bereaved Americans struggled to reconcile the systemized slaughter with a long-cherished belief in a loving and benevolent God. She uses the written memories of soldiers and their families as well as military leaders, chaplains, medical personnel, and even wartime poets to reconstruct the ways that those destined for the battlefield prepared themselves spiritually for violent ends, and how those they left behind reframed the losses so that spiritual bankruptcy and general despair did not result.

The huge death tolls experienced at Gettysburg, Shiloh, Bull Run, Antietam, and other battle sites resulted in new commercial enterprises, such as the undertaking profession. Embalming also became routine practice for the first time. On the military end, a federal system of national cemeteries was established for Union casualties, while the South honored its dead in private cemeteries that were also monuments to their lost effort.

Powerful and stirring, "This Republic of Suffering" provides a valuable new dimension to how we perceive the Civil War.

What happened at a battle after the fighting stopped? Until this book we didn't really think of the dead bodies and the effect they had on the friends and families that were left behind or even the townspeople near the battlefields and how they coped with the aftermath. This book delves into these facts and how they were handled. A well written book that enlightens and causes you to look deeper into war and all that it brings with it.

This book is very informative in a scholarly manner. It is filled with plenty of information and facts which are very educational to any Civil War buff. However, it is a bit repetitive and boring in some aspects. Reading about one particular subject during one particular time period becomes a bit daunting. I gave it 4 stars on the basis that it completely covers the topic of 'Death and the American Civil War'.

Nearly one hundred fifty years after the outbreak of the Civil War, the profound effects of that war are still being recounted in scores of books written about the conflict over the past few years. Among the best of them is Drew Gilpin Faust's, "The Republic of Suffering", which takes us close to the battlefields through a different lens of history...that of the individual. It is a deeply moving work.

Faust begins her book simply enough...a view of how soldiers looked at their own mortality and those whom had fallen around them. In fact, many, anticipating their own deaths, wrote words of comfort to their families, lest they should die. Was there such as thing as a "good death"? The author helps to explain that in the context of the war, both through personal and family perspectives.

As the book moves on, Faust begins some chapters which I found fascinating. Embalming, which was in its infancy, transformed the caring of the dead, not always to great satisfaction. This aspect of the war is not often touched upon and Faust makes it an especially intriguing one. Beyond that, the whole issue of spirituality comes into play and from here on the topics included in "The Republic of Suffering" spread more to women and those others left behind. How did they cope? What was it all to mean? The contributions of Walt Whitman, Ambrose Bierce and other poets and writers of the era are covered nicely and in final chapters, the accounting for and the numbering of the war dead are numbing, in itself. The profundity of the Civil War never ceases to amaze.

The author does well by letting her narrative take the form of short quotes from those who left writings behind...soldiers, wives, ministers, friends, etc...and it makes the book particularly compelling. I highly recommend "The Republic of Suffering" for the keen observances Drew Gilpin Faust has related and for the structure of the book, which keeps the reader focused and captivated.

One might look at the cover and hastily come to the conclusion that "Death and the Civil War" would be such a mundane subject. One should not be so quick to judge a book by its cover.

The book examines death during the Civil War in many different contexts -- from prevailing notions of how a person should die a "Good Death", the morality of killing, Christianity and other religions, honoring the dead, to respecting the deceased fighters' bodies. Dr. Faust does a good job of writing a book that would seem to be difficult to make interesting.

This is an excellent book, especially for someone interested in, well, the ultimate questions of life: Who are we? Where did we come from? Where are we going?

The context is the prolific loss of life in the War Between the States and how the loved ones simply coped. Questions about how they dealt with their grief and how it affected their Christian belief systems are movingly described. Thankfully, the author makes no value judgments on the different ways they did cope, she merely describes them in a respectful manner. Would that more modern nonfiction authors did the same.

Kindle formatting: Knopf appears to do better than most making the transition from paper to e-ink. The only problems with formatting I saw involved the occasional quotations of poetry by the author: indentation was inconsistent and usually closer to the right-hand margin than the left. Since such verse was included only occasionally it did not distract too much from the Kindle reading experience. Irritating in light of the $9.99 price, however.

Even in a family where one has repeatedly heard passed-down tales of the suffering of long-dead ancestors during the American Civil War, it is easy to relegate these stories to the realm of the irrelevant and/or the quaint. Drew Gilpin Faust's book brings home sharply and vividly the painful changes, losses, and grief our forebearers experienced. Citing even a few statistics from the book will serve to illustrate the universality of the pain of the time.

1. An estimated 620,000 Union and Confederate soldiers died between 1861-1865.
2. In Winchester,Va. the Stonewall Cemetary for 2,494 Confederate dead gathered from about 15 miles around the town contained 829 unknown soldiers buried in a single mound.
3. Estimates of civilian deaths from war-related causes are about 50,000.

To read this book is to understand a seldom-examined part of the American experience. This is a book every American should read.

Even in a family where one has repeatedly heard passed-down tales of the suffering of long-dead ancestors during the American Civil War, it is easy to relegate these stories to the realm of the irrelevant and/or the quaint. Drew Gilpin Faust's book,"This Republic of Suffering" brings home sharply and vividly the painful changes, losses, and grief our forebearers experienced. Citing even a few statistics from the book will serve to illustrate the universality of the pain of the time.

1. An estimated 620,000 Union and Confederate soldiers died between 1861-1865.
2. In Winchester,Va. the Stonewall Cemetary for 2,494 Confederate dead gathered from about 15 miles around the town contained 829 unknown soldiers buried in a single mound.
3. Estimates of civilian deaths from war-related causes are about 50,000.

To read this book is to understand a seldom-examined part of the American experience. This is a book every American should read.

These are the horrors of the Civil War that they didn't teach us in high school. I had a difficult time getting thru the first chapter of this book but stuck with it and am really glad I did.

Highly recommended for anyone interested in studying the Civil War.

I found this book to be very interesting & informative & very well written. It left nothing to the imagination, nothing to question about this time in our history. I am intrigued with the Civl War & Abraham Lincoln is my favorite president. I found it most interesting the way individuals serving in the war & those left behind handled the preparing for death. Also interesting how those serving helped alleviate the pain for those at home, in helping them to understand their loved ones last moments. It was amazing how the soldiers tried to take care of each other & pass on info even to the point of going out of their way to convey last thought.

The book reveals the author's amazing amount of research into an aspect of the Civil War that has been largely overlooked -- how did the soldier in the field, the families at home, and the nation as a whole deal with the unimaginable amount of death during and after the war? Indeed, the book argues it was in no small part the necessity of dealing with the physical, emotional, and moral contexts of coping with the carnage that has shaped the nation's understandings of war's sacrifice and honoring the dead ever since. Astonishing conceptual insights arise out of the innumerable concrete descriptions based on source materials.

Oh dear. Did I read the same book as the other reviewers? The one filled ad nauseum with footnotes? The one that manages to make the Civil War tedious? I suggest Civil War buffs pick up Lapham's Quarterly "States of War," for a mesmerizing reading experience.

I found it hard to image there was a book's worth of discussion on the social impact of Civil War death on the American psyche, but the book was hard to put down.

This is a perfect book, beautifully written and organized, and full of information. A whole new area of thought about our national history has been opened up to me.

I found this book, contrary to my first expecatations,to be absolutely fascinating. Every so often a book comes along that is unique and turns the reader's thoughts around on a topic--this is one of those books. I certainly am not particularly interested in the Civil War nor the concept of death--yet I was totally engrossed in this fine book by the new President of Harvard. The author's main theme is that the Civil War forever changed American's conceptions of death and the dying, and how we deal with this unpleasant topic. The chapters unfold in an well structured fashion that is clear and concise, and reflects the author's impeccable research (this project took ten years, although during period the author was working her way up the academic ladder at the University of Pennsylvania and Radcliff).

The initial chapter deals with Americans' conception of death and what it meant and how it should occur (what the author terms "the good death"). In many ways, Victorian influence is at work here. The second chapter, a most interesting one, focuses upon how the combatants viewed the act of killing each other. Next, what happened to all the bodies that resulted from this most costly war in our history? Amazingly, until the later stages of the Civil War, the government did not equip soliders with id's or assume responsibility for burial, notifying relatives, or returning bodies to loved ones. Following up on this topic, there is a chapter devoted to how the deceased were identified (or often not identified). Probably one of the most fascinating chapters deals with mourning--certainly an eye-opener for me. Somewhere along the way, as an incisive chapter discusses, Americans asked themselves what all this killing was about--what was the meaning and necessity. We also learn about the creation and implementation of the national cemetery system, as well as how the Southern States dealt with creating proper cemeteries through largely private means. Finally, in another engrossing chapter, the author reviews how numerical accounting of the dead was carried out and what are the most realistic figures for the total dead (over 620,000 on both sides).

The book is just superior in every way--clarity and comprehensiveness of analysis; extent of research; attention to the political, intellectual and spiritual dimensions; and the ability to write in a fashion that holds the reader's interest even though many of these topics are unfamiliar and perhaps unpleasant as well. The book is beautifully printed on fine paper--another outstanding performance by Berryville Graphics in Virginia, which increasingly is turning out impressive books for Knopf. By any measure, an important book that deserves serious consideration.

The American Civil War has had more books written about it than any other period in the history of the world, save the Napoleonic Wars. So one might think that all that could be said had been said.
But one would be wrong.
Drew Gilpin Faust has managed to write an important and highly original book. This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War brings to light an area that, for the most part, was shrouded in the dark: the impact of the Civil War's massive death toll (620,000) on the living. Faust explains how new ideas combined with old beliefs helped Americans North and South to cope with four years of unbelievable slaughter. Our modern view of death and dying has been greatly influenced by what the Civil War generation endured nearly 150 years ago.
Faust adds greatly to our understanding of the Civil war. Her book on killing and death and dying also destroys the romance and sentimentality that have grown up around the war, stripping it, one might say, to its bare bones.
No Civil War library is complete without this eloquent, well-researched book.

To be fair, I'm not far into this work on the Civil War and its dead. But already I feel pistol-whipped by the phrases "the Good Death" and "ars moriendi," and I'm concerned the author will continue to belabor points that I know I've read elsewhere. The art and subtlety of dying in the Victorian age is not a new concept, and yet I have the feeling that, by dressing the concept up in new finery, the author claims it as her own. It isn't. I'll trudge on in my heretical cycnicism but based on what I've read so far, I don't expect to find much if anything original in this work.

Using disparate archival letters, sermons, eulogies, government records, and newspaper accountings, Dr. Drew Gilpin Faust carefully reconstructs these primary historical artifacts into cohesive and compelling narrative about death and The Dead of the American Civil War. She paints a nuanced canvas of 19th-century American military, social, and family life in both the North and the South--richly textured with the ideas, values, religion, and politics of the era. Importantly, Dr. Faust identifies elements within the Civil War that in many ways presage what was to occur during the Great War in Europe within less than half a century of Appomattox. Among her strongest commentary was the discussion of authors Ambrose Bierce and Herman Melville. Despite the sheer crushing weight of the subject of mass death in the Civil War (more than 600,000 casualties in total), Dr. Faust's in-depth scholarship and engaging writing provide welcome fulcrums that are leveraged to lift the dense shrouds of this topic high enough for light to penetrate, and insight and much wisdom to emerge.

Robert S. Frey, Adjunct Professor, History
Brenau University
Gainesville, GA

In this startling and fascinating book the author examines the nature of death in the Civil War. Hardly a town in the American east is not adorned with a Civil War memorial and monument. In rural Maine small towns have them next to old cannons. The Civil War affected America, even the smallest places, because of its huge death tolls for the time. Some 620,000 people died, another million were wounded. Today the same figures would be 6 million and twenty million. THis was a massive conflict of American against American, brother against brother.

THe alarming nature of the conflict, its use of new weapons and old methods of fighting, led to horrific deatht tolls numbering into the 20-40,000 mark for some one day battles like Antietem. Where were all these dead, some of them unknown, to be buried? How did the soldiers confront death?

The systems established were different. The Federal government built cemetaries for the Union dead while the South had to made due. But the south would not forget even if the federal government forgot about the massive numbers of Southern dead (who as a percentage were a much higher number of the southern population which was largely agrarian and rural).

The Civil War was a massive conflict and the attachment of Patriotic Gore: Studies in the Literature of the American Civil War is an apt name for it. This book adds a new dimention to its study, one that has been lacking and one that is fascinating.

Seth J. Frantzman

This is a powerful book that deals with one aspect of the Civil War in a very different context than normal--death. Many books speak of the sanguinary nature of the Civil War, death due to battlefield trauma as well as death due to disease, accident, and so on. But this book, written by Drew Gilpin Faust, addresses death on a much broader basis. As a result, this is a powerful work.

One simple fact to begin: the number of Civil War soldiers who died is about equal to the number of American dead from the Revolutionary War, War of 1812, Mexican War, Spanish-American War, World War I, World War II, and Korea combined. The focus of the book is briefly stated at the outset (Page xv): "Beginning with individuals' confrontation with death and dying, the book explores how those experiences transformed society, culture, and politics in what became a broader republic of shared suffering."

Each chapter has a poignancy that is almost palpable. Chapter 1 focuses on the dying by soldiers. The effort to die a good death was one that manifest itself for many a soldier--Yankee and Rebel. One interesting issue--soldiers appeared to fear death by disease more than death in the heat of combat. Soldiers often carried letters to battle, containing their last words to families and loved ones in case they perished. This is an eye opening chapter.

Chapter 2 deals with the other side of the coin--killing the enemy. Many were torn by their Biblical desire to avoid killing others versus their duty to try to do so. Killing others sometimes changed troops, numbing human feeling and producing aftereffects.

Chapter 3 addresses burying the dead. After battles, there was often little time and the dead were buried in mass graves, often with no identification (no dog tags then). Soldiers felt an intense desire to decently bury the dead--but this was often more easily said than done. Chapter 4 deals with a related issue, naming those who died. Without identification, large numbers of dead soldiers were buried in anonymous graves. Even if reburied with more dignity, the names were still absent. The chapter addresses many issues, including the effort by loved ones to find the remains of their dead soldier(s).

Other chapters deal with how people tried to make sense of the death of their loved ones; the nature of mourning; the relationship of death and religion; obligations to the dead; wondering how many actually died.

A harsh truth (Page 267): "Nearly half the dead remained unknown, the fact of their deaths supposed but undocumented. . . ." And, the final sentence in the work (Page 271): "We still work to live with the riddle that they--the Civil War dead and their survivors alike--had to solve so long ago." A powerful book, one that will disturb many as they read it. But it also illuminates a little told side of the Civil War. Strongly recommended. . . .

Its difficult to imagine the bloodshed that took place in the Civil War, and the impact it had on the generation that fought it and their families. Out of a population of 30 million or so, 3.3 million fought and over 620,000 died. In the battle of Gettysburg, the clashing armies endured 51,000 casualties in only 2 days of fighting. It was truly the only time in US history that we have waged total war on an adversary. Most of this is lost in most histories of the war. They tend to deal with more macro issues surrounding the conflict.

Faust's new historical work on the Civil War brings home the stories, on a very personal and visceral level the impact that the war had Americans, as no family was left unaffected by the conflict. The scale of what happened was not expected by either side during the start of the war, and Faust uses first hand accounts to bring the disbelief and horror that rising death toll had on the nation.

Not a stand alone history of the conflict, but an excellent companion.

Its difficult to imagine the bloodshed that took place in the Civil War, and the impact it had on the generation that fought it and their families. Out of a population of 30 million or so, 3.3 million fought and over 620,000 died. In the battle of Gettysburg, the clashing armies endured 51,000 casualties in only 2 days of fighting. It was truly the only time in US history that we have waged total war on an adversary. Most of this is lost in most histories of the war. They tend to deal with more macro issues surrounding the conflict.

Faust's new historical work on the Civil War brings home the stories, on a very personal and visceral level the impact that the war had Americans, as no family was left unaffected by the conflict. The scale of what happened was not expected by either side during the start of the war, and Faust uses first hand accounts to bring the disbelief and horror that rising death toll had on the nation.

Not a stand alone history of the conflict, but an excellent companion.

Drew Faust's "This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War" offers a look into the Civil War that is truly unique -- the impact of death as a phenomenon upon individuals (whose reactions ranged from horror and refusal of participating in killing to gleeful celebrations of killing), and upon America as a society and culture. I don't believe there is a significant aspect of the subject left unexplored; Ms. Faust even discusses its effects upon the poetry of Emily Dickinson as well as the creation of National Cemeteries and of the rise of embalming as a practical business. The unprecedented level of carnage sent shock waves through the American populace for decades afterwards, and even helped define inter-racial and inter-gender relations. "This Republic of Suffering" is obviously not your standard Civil War history, but it is a book that nonetheless should be of great interest to any serious, thoughtful student of that conflict.

Ms. Faust has exhaustedly researched a little-explored area of the Civil War. In the opening chapter, she utilizes numbers to illustrate the impact of death upon the American Republic -- for another war to have the reach that the Civil War did in its time, it would need to have 6 million dead today. At the onset of the war, neither the North nor the South had prepared for such massive causalities over four years. No system existed to identify, transport or bury the corpses. No one asked, "What do you do with 2,000 dead bodies, some from the other side?" Ms. Faust answers those questions in an informative, readable style.

Faust's book addresses her topic with precision, rigor, and, what's more, innovation. It's a fascinating read, filled with well-articulated, sophisticated arguments. These are clearly the result of studious research, and exhibit a great deal of respect for the author's historical subjects--qualities too rarely seen in scholarly work today.

I had the misfortune of tuning in quite by accident to an interview of Terry Gross and Drew Gilpin Faust, the president of Harvard yesterday. If I were to tell you that my face was all in a scowl for almost 35 minutes before I had to shut off the silliness finally, I would not be exaggerating. Faust should stick to her presidential duties- you know, raising money for the endowment and such, rather than "researching" and writing such junk as her new "ground breaking" book of hooey.

It was truly astounding to me to hear this respected historian and college president all confused about motivations of civil war soldiers, and how they were so obsessed with this academic analysts-invented false concept of the "good death". My own experience in academic history with silly historians like President Faust prompted me to leave the academy entirely. The majority of academic historians simply to do not understand the war. They are totally confused by the mire that the study of American history has become in the university, all confused by social history, economic history, race studies, women's studies, etc.

Was I surprised that Dr. Faust had made the subject almost dull in her interview? Nope. Was I surprised at the flat dispassionate tone? Nope.

Why do you suppose that so many students hate history and only re-discover it, if ever, when they are adults? because of the awful way that it is taught in high schools and universities by historians trained in an entirely confused academia. if ever an academic discipline was in trouble, history is the one, and this interview is perfect illustration of it.

I was astounded when Faust described a dying soldier surrounding himself with photographs of his family as he lay close to death on some unnamed battlefield. Her explanation of the "meaning" of this behavior by the poor soldier almost made me stop the car, open the window, and heave. For Faust this was illustrative of the need by "victorian people" to be surrounded by their loved ones so that they could look into their eyes and validate themselves with a brave/good death so that they could be elevated to the next life. Such utter hogwash!

Folks miss their kin, dying folks miss their kin! If a dying soldier was lucky enough to have photos of his family and had the time left - he would look at them all as his life ebbed away thinking thoughts of them, and missing them and wishing that he could be with them and sure as h*** wishing he wasn't dying!

This over analysis, illustrated so clearly by Faust, by academic historians makes history seem not about people but about concepts (so many of them false and theoretical). This is what academic historians love- so that they can then write books about such concepts and teach these fantasies to their poor yet unreceptive students and most importantly, justify their teaching positions.

The simplicity, pathos, tragedy and loneliness of the soldier's battle death is, for folks like the president of Harvard, some kind of fulfillment of religious or sociological need, rather than the human tragedy that is exactly what it is.

Over-analysis, mistaken analysis, silliness such as this, and a bizarre over-emphasis on issues other than core matters have made history a battered and declining discipline in the university. Of course, recent plagiarism cases and cases of propagandistic teaching by folks in this field have not helped.

This Terry Gross interview with Faust should be de rigeur for all civil war students so that they can see how totally out of touch the supposed "experts" in the academy are from this most important of all events in american history. Where the simplest most sublime explanations are the truth the academic historian will invent some