Book description
December 1862 drove the United States towards a breaking point. The Battle of Fredericksburg shattered Union forces and Northern confidence. As Abraham Lincoln's government threatened to fracture, this critical moment also tested five extraordinary individuals whose lives reflect the soul of a nation. The changes they underwent led to profoundā¦
Why read it?
1 author picked A Worse Place Than Hell as one of their favorite books. Why do they recommend it?
John Matteson is a deft prose stylist who once more delivers in this engrossing narrative of the Civil War as seen through the eyes of five key protagonistsāincluding the poet Walt Whitman and a young Louisa May Alcott. The characters wind up on the murderous battlefields and teeming hospital wards of Fredericksburg, Virginia. The title is admittedly deceptive; readers expecting an operational or tactical history of Ambrose Burnsideās rout on the Rappahannock wonāt find it here. On the other hand, those interested in a searing meditation on all that the war did to individual human bodies and mindsāand the collectiveā¦
From Brian Matthew's list on laying bare the human ordeal of the Civil War.
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