Books like Louisa May Alcott — picked by fans

Early in the war, writer Louisa May Alcott journeyed to the nation’s capital to care for sick and wounded soldiers. Over a period of six weeks, she experienced firsthand the rigors of life in crowded hospital wards as a nurse to men suffering from disease and wounds. She recorded her observations in a series of accounts printed in a Boston newspaper. These writings formed the basis of Hospital Sketches. Published a month after the end of the Battle of Gettysburg, when the outcome of the war remained uncertain, Alcott’s words encouraged other women to support the U.S. war effort, and remind us today of the critical role of nurses in times of conflict.

This book opened up Louisa, and who she was to me. We can see her cheery optimism when she is younger, as well as the many inner battles she has with herself. We see her wit and humor, her desire to care for those she loves. As she ages and struggles with health issues, the reader feels her pain. Not a light-hearted book, but an extremely insightful one for those who want to gain a true glimpse into the character of this remarkable woman.

We know Louisa May Alcott primarily as an author and the writer of the great masterpiece, Little Women, but many do not realize she was also a nurse during the Civil War. This book explores how her experiences in Washington D.C. as a nurse impacted her writing as well as her beliefs. Easy to read, captivating account. Highly recommend!

Ranging from sweet letters to her family to everyday business correspondence, these letters open up Louisa’s world to me. The reader obtains a snapshot of Louisa’s life and career through her various correspondences as well as glimpses into her writing process and her struggles to write prolificly when her health deteriorates. It was fun to read about her books in the letters and gain insight into the story behind them.

This book starts with an unforgettable vignette from a silent film produced in 1900: an alligator swallows an unsuspecting Black child while he is fishing by the river. A man comes to the rescue, slitting the gator open and lifting the child out of its stomach. From there, Tompkins shows how eating culture became a part of racist ideology in the United States. I gobbled this fascinating book up in just a few sittings.   

A heartfelt and poignant tale of faith and perseverance with authentic details sure to resonate with historical fiction fans, this tale of grace and forgiveness is both tender and endearing. In many ways, reading this book was like going home. I was delighted to see the historical details during the search for Booth (something I spent months researching as I dug through the trial records for my own series). It's a beautiful story of grace and forgiveness.

I loved how this book blended the experience of Cadet William Hugh McDowell, a cadet from the Virginia Military Institute who fought in the Battle of New Market during the Civil War, with fictional modern-day Benjy, a 20th-century boy who is visiting his grandmother in New Market during his summer vacation. This book blends Benjy’s fictional story with Hugh’s historic and nonfiction life experience.

As a teaching tool, I was able to clarify the difference between fact and fiction for my students in our study of the Civil War. I was later amazed to learn that an element of the story that Elaine had created to tie the two boys together turned out to really exist–the boy’s watch.

Although the Civil War was principally a land conflict, naval contributions were fundamental, not just peripheral or supporting. This excellent operational and campaign overview examines social, political, and technological revolutions in Western warfare leading to and through the struggle. It deals primarily with terrestrial warfare, but unlike many such works, places waterborne operations in context and gives the navy its due. Steam propulsion and industrial superiority produced massive Union naval power for a strangling blockade, fortress-busting warship squadrons, and an unprecedented riverine fleet. The Confederacy’s coasts and seaports constituted a third major theater while in the west, rivers were avenues of invasion and conquest. Chapter 5 contains a cogent discussion of “The Unfulfilled Promise of Joint [Army-Navy] Operations.” Highly recommended as a well-integrated military-naval history.

After disguising herself as a man, Ash Thompson dons the uniform of a Union soldier in the Civil War. She is an enthralling character and not only did I avidly follow Ash to the front lines, this fine novel gave me the courage to move ahead with my work.

I decided my major character, Rory Chase, would be a woman caught up in the intrigue and espionage along our border with British Canada in 1864. Time and again, I said to myself, if Hunt can pull this off with his heroine, I believe I can do the same with Rory.

That I, too, can write about a woman who must learn the rules of warfare and espionage and then decide when to break them. 

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 protagonists—including 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 Burnside’s rout on the Rappahannock won’t find it here. On the other hand, those interested in a searing meditation on all that the war did to individual human bodies and minds—and the collective American soul—will savor this haunting, smart, and elegant book.