During the Civil War, 620,000 soldiers lost their lives—equivalent to six million in today's population. This Republic of Suffering explores the impact of the enormous death toll from material, political, intellectual, and spiritual angles.
Drew Gilpin Faust delineates the ways death changed not only individual lives, but the life of the nation, and describes how a deeply religious culture reconciled the slaughter with its belief in a benevolent God. Throughout, the viewpoints of soldiers, families, statesmen, generals, preachers, poets, surgeons, and nurses, Northerners and Southerners, slaveholders and 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.
Drew Gilpin Faust is the author of several books, including the New York Times bestselling This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War, winner of the Bancroft Prize and a finalist for the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize, and Mothers of Invention: Women of the Slaveholding South in the American Civil War, which won the Francis Parkman Prize. A former dean and university president, she is the Arthur Kingsley Porter University Professor at Harvard University.
Lorna Raver, named one of AudioFile magazine’s Best Voices of the Year, has received numerous Audie nominations and AudioFile Earphones Awards. An experienced stage actress, she has also guest-starred on many top television series and starred in director Sam Raimi’s film Drag Me to Hell. Among her many Blackstone titles are The Age of Innocence, Up from Orchard Street, The Lodger, Selected Readings from the Portable Dorothy Parker, and Diamond Ruby.