This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War

As Drew Gilpin Faust writes early in This Republic of Suffering, "Civil War soldiers had many opportunities to die and a variety of ways in which to do so." He spends the next 300-odd pages describing them.

Much of what Faust describes is familiar to readers of Civil War history - the hundred ills of men in camp, artillery fire and snipers, gangrene and sepsis. Where This Republic of Suffering stands apart is the attention to the homefront - from the notion of the "good death" and how it prepared both soldiers and civilians to accept death to Faust's attention to the missing, and the impact of these men on the homefront. It was the missing on whom Clara Barton focused her attention for years after the war, chasing down information on 63,000 inquiries related to Union men alone. It was these same missing men whose fate spurred the development of systems of greater accountability in the U.S. Armed Forces, that future generations would be spared grappling with the idea that one could simply vanish as though into thin air.

Four stars.

Meg & Jo

Virginia Kantra's Meg and Jo is a modern take on Louisa May Alcott's Little Women, with Jo imagined as a struggling journalist-cum-chef in New York City and Meg as an accountant-turned-stay at home mom in small town North Carolina. Their younger sisters Beth and Amy also have updated lives, as well as the young Mr. Lawrence, March parents, and all the rest.

My overriding memory of Little Women was that Beth died. Without giving away too much, I can reveal that Beth did not die in Meg and Jo, but given how true-to-form Kantra kept things (Eric Bhaer is a German-American chef, among other plot points drawn from the original), I'll be curious to see how Beth fares in the yet-to-be-released Beth and Amy.

Kantra writes well and the ingenuity she displays in recreating Little Women is commendable. Meg and Jo are both incredibly...irritating...which I also vaguely recall. (It's fair to say I wasn't a huge Little Women fan.) That she recreates all of this with such authenticity and yet originality is a testament to her writing chops. All of that said, this is a book best enjoyed, I imagine, by those who loved Little Women and would like to imagine Jo and her sisters carried forward into the 21st century.

Four stars.

This Blessed Earth: A Year in the Life of an American Family

In This Blessed Earth, Ted Genoways details a year in the life of a small, family-owned and operated Nebraska farm. Through the highs - successful bids on livestock at auction, or successful replacement of machinery parts without waiting for a technician - to the lows - the vagaries of weather and markets - Genoways recounts it all, while also shedding light on current agricultural practices and policy.

The family Genoways follows, the Hammonds, are fifth and sixth generation Nebraskans and farmers, with a decidedly political bent. Rick and his daughter Meghan (who together with her husband Kyle Galloway take on an increasing share of the farm) are referred to rather derisively by others in the community as the "local liberals." They vociferously opposed the Keystone pipeline, going as far as to give over one highly productive field to the construction of a solar powered barn and losing the right to farm other fields that they rented but did not own in a dispute with a neighbor. In these interactions and others, Genoways provides a glimpse of life in rural America.

This Blessed Earth also offers a cleared eyed view of the options facing the young people in towns like Clarks, Nebraska. The options aren't many, and largely consist of the military and the farm,  mostly, even for those who attend college. Genoways provides a similarly unvarnished view of the options facing farmers, which largely consist of candy-colored seeds so coated with various chemicals that the unearthly coloring is intended as a constant reminder that handling them can be hazardous and should be done with heavy gloves. Yum!

This Blessed Earth is good reading for anyone who wants to know a bit more about the origins of so much food in America today, from beef to beans, (Food of a Younger Land, the origins aren't) and should be required reading for those who want to understand more about how society has cleaved apart in recent decades. Genoways writes beautifully and the Hammonds - Rick, Meghan, and Kyle Galloway - make for sympathetic and nuanced protagonists whom the reader can't help but cheer on.

Five stars.