A brilliant, if grim book, that provides concrete detail and reflective analysis on how the Civil War marked a turning point in our national reverence for "dead troops" and letting dying in a war become a self-perpetuating act of nobility that ennobles all wars, even if they are errant and unnecessary (as in the case of Iraq, but that is our observation, not the author's.)

This book is fast becoming a bestseller because it reawakens our knowledge about how pivotal the Civil War was in the evolution of our nation to this very day -- and it does it by focusing on the massive carnage that incurred and the glorification of death in that hideous conflict.

About the author:

Drew Gilpin Faust is (the first female) president of Harvard University, where she also holds the Lincoln Professorship in History. Dean of the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study from 2001 to 2007, she came to Harvard after twenty-five years on the faculty of the University of Pennsylvania. She is the author of five previous books, including Mothers of Invention: Women of the Slaveholding South in the American Civil War, which won the Francis Parkman Prize and the Avery Craven Prize. She and her husband live in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

From Random House, the publisher:

"During the war, approximately 620,000 soldiers lost their lives. An equivalent proportion of today’s population would be six million. This Republic of Suffering explores the impact of this enormous death toll from every angle: material, political, intellectual, and spiritual. The eminent historian Drew Gilpin Faust delineates the ways death changed not only individual lives but the life of the nation and its understanding of the rights and responsibilities of citizenship. She describes how survivors mourned and how a deeply religious culture struggled to reconcile the slaughter with its belief in a benevolent God, pondered who should die and under what circumstances, and reconceived its understanding of life after death."

An online reviewer:

It's difficult for us today to appreciate just how deadly the Civil War was. The numbers are staggering--620,000 dead soldiers, at least 50,000 dead civilians, an estimated 6 million pounds of human and animal carcasses at Gettysburg, etc--can't convey the concrete horror of a nation living day after day with the shock, disorientation, and despair caused by the bloodiest war in the country's history. The war years surely did transform the nation into a "republic of suffering" (a phrase coined by Frederick Law Olmsted).

Faust argues that the nation tried to keep its head above water by, for example, ritualizing the final moments of wounded soldiers to make them more compatible with mid-nineteenth century models of a "good death"; justifying increasing levels of battlefield slaughter by invoking God, patriotic duty, and justice (which frequently was vengeance); trying to identify and bury bodies of the slain in such a way as to preserve some semblance of their humanity, despite the horrible maiming many of them suffered; creating public and private rituals of mourning; holding "the enemy" accountable for the carnage; and keeping the memory of the slain alive after the war (feeding into Lost Cause sensibilities on the one hand and Bloody Shirt ones on the other). To a certain extent, as Faust acknowledges, similar kinds of coping mechanisms are adopted by Americans during any war. But context determines precisely how these mechanisms will be enacted, and she does an excellent job of making sense of how they manifested in Civil War America.

At the end of the day, Americans who lived through the Civil War needed to find a way to normalize their existences both during the actual conflict and afterwards, and to find some overarching meaning to the death and suffering that would justify the sacrifices. Given the war's unprecedented carnage, the task was as pressing as it was, ultimately, impossible. But in the aftermath of the war, the dead became, in the eyes of popular mythology, the sacrificial humus in which a newer, unified, and stronger nation would rise. Glorification of a nation's war dead may be inevitable. But it can also be a dangerous justification of future wars.

Faust's thought-provoking, sensitive, and ground-breakinig book will become a standard work. It's much more than a book about the Civil War. It's also a meditation on the meaning of war and the human need to somehow infuse meaning into an enterprise that often seems so bleakly wasteful and tragically brutal. Faust's book richly deserves at least the Lincoln Prize. Personally, I'd like to see it honored with a National Book Award.