Many Americans, argues Michael C. C. Adams, tend to think of the
Civil War as more glorious, less awful, than the reality. Millions
of tourists flock to battlefields each year as vacation
destinations, their perceptions of the war often shaped by
reenactors who work hard for verisimilitude but who cannot
ultimately simulate mutilation, madness, chronic disease, advanced
physical decay. In Living Hell, Adams tries a different tack,
clustering the voices of myriad actual participants on the firing
line or in the hospital ward to create a virtual historical
reenactment. Perhaps because the United States has not seen
conventional war on its own soil since 1865, the collective memory
of its horror has faded, so that we have sanitized and romanticized
even the experience of the Civil War. Neither film nor reenactment
can fully capture the hard truth of the four-year conflict. Living
Hell presents a stark portrait of the human costs of the Civil War
and gives readers a more accurate appreciation of its profound and
lasting consequences. Adams examines the sharp contrast between the
expectations of recruits versus the realities of communal living,
the enormous problems of dirt and exposure, poor diet,
malnutrition, and disease. He describes the slaughter produced by
close-order combat, the difficulties of cleaning up the
battlefields-where tens of thousands of dead and wounded often lay
in an area of only a few square miles-and the resulting
psychological damage survivors experienced. Drawing extensively on
letters and memoirs of individual soldiers, Adams assembles vivid
accounts of the distress Confederate and Union soldiers faced
daily: sickness, exhaustion, hunger, devastating injuries, and
makeshift hospitals where saws were often the medical instrument of
choice. Inverting Robert E. Lee's famous line about war, Adams
suggests that too many Americans become fond of war out of
ignorance of its terrors. Providing a powerful counterpoint to
Civil War glorification, Living Hell echoes William Tecumseh
Sherman's comment that war is cruelty and cannot be refined. Praise
for Our Masters the Rebels: A Speculation on Union Military Failure
in the East, 1861-1865 "This excellent and provocative work
concludes with a chapter suggesting how the image of Southern
military superiority endured in spite of defeat."- Civil War
History "Adams's imaginative connections between culture and combat
provide a forceful reminder that Civil War military history belongs
not in an encapsulated realm, with its own categories and arcane
language, but at the center of the study of the intellectual,
social, and psychological currents that prevailed in the
mid-nineteenth century."- Journal of American History Praise for
The Best War Ever: America and World War II "Adams has a real gift
for efficiently explaining complex historical problems."- Reviews
in American History "Not only is this mythologizing bad history,
says Adams, it is dangerous as well. Surrounding the war with an
aura of nostalgia both fosters the delusion that war can cure our
social ills and makes us strong again, and weakens confidence in
our ability to act effectively in our own time."- Journal of
Military History
General
Is the information for this product incomplete, wrong or inappropriate?
Let us know about it.
Does this product have an incorrect or missing image?
Send us a new image.
Is this product missing categories?
Add more categories.
Review This Product
No reviews yet - be the first to create one!
Welcome to Loot.co.za!
Sign in / Register |Wishlists & Gift Vouchers |Help | Advanced search
