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This Republic of Suffering
- Death and the American Civil War
- Narrated by: Lorna Raver
- Length: 10 hrs and 54 mins
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Publisher's Summary
Throughout, the viewpoints of soldiers, families, statesmen, generals, preachers, poets, surgeons and nurses, Northerners and Southerners, slaveholders, freed people, the most exalted, and the most humble are brought together to give a vivid understanding of the Civil War's widely shared reality.
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Average Customer RatingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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Overall
- D. Littman
- 04-21-08
a unique civil war perspective
This is a wonderful book. A new & unique twist on understanding the Civil War, which is an amazing accomplishment given all that there is already. Beautifully written and beautifully read. Each chapter/subject seems to roll seamlessly into the next, so you hardly notice the page (I mean minutes) roll by. One of the best history books I've listened to from Audible in several years.
29 people found this helpful
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Overall
- Margaret
- 01-15-09
This Republic of Suffering
Drew Gilpin Faust's perspective on the Civil War is a must read for anyone who loves history and understands how our past shapes our present. Although at times the details are unflinching and grisly, they are included to paint a graphic picture of the true cost of war, and to put pain, loss and grief in true perspective. This should be required reading for American history students.
5 people found this helpful
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Performance
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- Fin H
- 10-27-19
pretty good
this was quite interesting although the reader sounds like she is preaching and it really works for the quotations but sometimes I wanted a break in tone.
3 people found this helpful
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Overall
- Phillip Goodson
- 01-30-10
Good book - terrible narration
The narrator reminded me of the voice of Rudolph in the old claymation cartoon, but the book was well written and informative.
6 people found this helpful
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- Angela Greene
- 08-01-15
amazing book, great narration!
Every American should read this book to understand the true cost of the Civil War
2 people found this helpful
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Overall
- Dallas
- 09-14-08
Schoolmarm narrator
The book is well researched and interesting(and somewhat tedious if you are not "into" Civil War history) . The narrators treatment of letters and papers from the period is a problem however. She adopts a schoolmarm tone that is both dismissive of and condescending to the people that wrote the documents. I found that irritating.
17 people found this helpful
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- C. Harris
- 09-15-21
"The work of Death" - a compelling theme
The central theme of this book is "The work of death". It analyzes how death and dying worked in Civil War-era society, how it transformed Judeo-Christian, mostly fundamentalist, men when they killed, and how industry and the service sector had to transform to handle the disposition of the remains of so many men who died far from home. I understood, in a statistical sense, the number of wounded and dead at Fredericksburg, Antietam, Gettysburg, but I never thought about how a soldier's remains were identified and how their family was notified. We take "dog tags", National Cemeteries, and War Department notification for granted, but these things were created during and after the Civil War.
The narrator is sometimes a bit dramatic and if the subject matter were more dryly historical, it may have been more off-putting. However, her drama, in the face of the often ghastly imagery of Civil War dead, kind of worked.
My main complaint is that the book is often repetitive. Some themes, like that of The Good Death, are revisited repeatedly; more than is necessary to illustrate the author's point.
All-in-all, this is a compelling book. I heard about it while listening to an equally compelling podcast called Death, et seq which deals with the disposition of the dead and the law. It mentioned the book in the context of funereal and burial practices, including embalming, that originated during the Civil war era.
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- Patrick Bogart
- 03-28-21
Performance Subtracts From Content
I’ve never paid much attention to the narrator’s style. Until this one. Tough to get through the book - too much overacting.
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- Kilgore Trout
- 01-07-21
Not What I Was Hoping For...
The opening to the book, describing the Victorian views on death and funeral practices was very informative and more in line with how I thought the rest of the book would go. However, the majority of the book was a seemingly never ending list of anecdotes taken from diaries, newspapers and official reports. There wasn't much discussion after about the second chapter, just endless anecdotes, which was not what I was hoping for. In all, the previously mentioned introduction, part of an early chapter about the dilemmas soldiers faced regarding battlefield burials and the last chapter about the Body Reclamation Committees where the best parts of the book. The book as a whole seemed listless, drifting from unconnected newspaper articles used to illustrate the rampant racism in the South, to an entire chapter dedicated the writings of Bierce, Dickinson and Melville. I can't say that it was entirely uninformative, but I also can't say that it was entirely worth my time.
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- Peg Kinsman
- 11-24-20
Simply stunning.
The book was well researched and eloquently presented. The reading of it itself was lilting and smooth.