Rob's Reviews > This Republic of Suffering: Death and the
American Civil War  This Republic of Suffering by Drew Gilpin
Faust  's review Aug 13, 12  bookshelves: read-in-2012, history,
non-fiction, everyone-dies Read from June 01 to 06, 2012  (7/10)
This Republic of Suffering is more a history of death, or at
least a history of ways of thinking about death, than it is a
history of the Civil War. Faust (what an appropriate name!)
details the various ways that 19th-century American culture
coped with the mass death of the Civil War and has a lot of
juicy details and strange stories about a traumatized society.
I can't help but feel, though, that this might have been better
as an essay than a book. Most of the chapters are variations on
the same theme, and threaten to drown you in examples. The
thesis of the book is constantly repeated until it becomes a
vague blur. Possibly I just dislike this because it reminds me
too much of my own academic writing, but it does come off as
distinctly thesis-y.  Because of it