In "Awaiting the Heavenly Country," Mark Schantz leads his reader on a tour of the fascinating and often perverse world of 19th Century death literature, philosophy, and photography. What about those post-mortem pictures of Aunt Ida on the mantle? Wondering how your friends will recognize you in heaven? How could they read and enjoy all that bad poetry about the romantic deaths of young people? Schantz argues that a study of 19th death customs, though perhaps a joy in itself, is integral to understanding the startling number of deaths in the American Civil War. Advances in military machinery and speculation about the incompetence of generals can prove only partly sufficient to account for the carnage. Schantz suggests that confidence concerning one's heavenly future and one's martial fame makes it a bit easier to rush headlong into battle with one's bayonet fixed, quite possibly to die with one's fellows in droves. The 19th Century, with its peculiar death ways, may have provided this sort of confidence wholesale. I find Schantz's case fairly convincing. As for style, his prose is exciting, and his wit, if often subtle, sparkles. The "Advantages of Consumption" (i.e. tuberculosis) is a particular highlight. Finally, though Schantz appropriately confines his discussion to a particular period in history, his argument should be very interesting for those engaged in discussions of cultural attitudes towards death and war in 21st Century America. Overall, "Awaiting the Heavenly Country" is an excellent and thought-provoking book.

Mark Schantz's eagerly anticipated Awaiting the Heavenly Country will inevitably be compared to Drew Gilpin Faust's This Republic of Suffering. Faust, whose book beat Schantz's to the bookstores by just a few months, has explored death and the Civil War for several years, and some of the themes her book explores--for example, 19th century American notions of the good death, disposal of huge quantities of corpses, and rituals of mourning--are also investigated by Schantz.

But it would be a pity to regard Schantz's book as a redundant late-comer, because it complements more than duplicates Faust's work. Ironically, this is because Schantz's book doesn't really live up to its subtitle: The Civil War and America's Culture of Death. Schantz actually has relatively little to say about the Civil War. He's much more concerned with exploring the "death-embracing" culture of antebellum America, that "shared body of cultural assumptions and attitudes about death that helped to sustain a war that fractured a nation" by making it "easier to kill and be killed" (pp. 4, 2). To this end, he explores the sheer ubiquity of death in antebellum America (Chapter 1), antebellum notions of heaven (Chapter 2), the ethos of cemeteries and heroism (Chapter 3), antebellum death poetry in the "Southern Literary Messenger" (Chapter 4), the perceived relationship between a good death and freedom (Chapter 5), and depictions of death in memorial lithography and postmortem photos (Chapter 6).

Schantz's treatment of death in antebellum America is closely documented and frequently insightful (especially interesting is his analysis of the influence of classical Greco-Roman models on the nation's understanding of heroism, pp. 86-96). Chapter 5's discussion of good death, freedom, and slavery offers the closest tie-in with explicitly Civil War themes; the other chapters make only tangential connections. That's why I would suggest Schantz's book as a quite good prologue to Faust's, which deals much more explicitly with the Civil War.

In his epilogue (pp. 207-10), Schantz reminds us that it's anachronistic to think that basic presumptions about life and death held by the Civil War generation are similar (much less identical) to ours today. We may be tempted to think so because of the influence of popular films and novels, but we should resist the temptation. It was a different time and a different ethos, and nothing so underscores this fact than the difference between the "death-embracing" ethos of early 19th century America and the "death-denying" one of our own day. In reminding us of this point, Schantz not only helps us to keep our understanding of the period in perspective. He also sheds valuable light for us on how and why the nation coped with the colossal death and destruction of its only civil war.