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.