Death’s Army

“Americans had never endured anything like the losses they suffered between 1861 and 1865 and have experienced nothing like them since." The author writes: “’The work of death was Civil War America’s most fundamental and most demanding undertaking.’ Her account of how that work was done, much of it gleaned from the letters of those who found themselves forced to do it, is too richly detailed and covers too much ground to be summarized easily. She overlooks nothing — from the unsettling enthusiasm some men showed for killing to the near-universal struggle for an answer to the question posed by the Confederate poet Sidney Lanier: ‘How does God have the heart to allow it?’”