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A Worse Place Than Hell: How the Civil War Battle of Fredericksburg Changed a Nation
Top of the pile
75
/100
I Index Overall Rating
Readers
74/100Critics
77/100Scholars
Author:
John Matteson
Publisher:
W. W. Norton & Company
Date:
February 9, 2021
Pulitzer Prize-winning author John Matteson illuminates three harrowing months of the Civil War and their enduring legacy for America.
What The Reviewers Say
... moving.
... is not, strictly speaking, a military history, though the reader learns about battle tactics and strategies. This is human history, in which Matteson skillfully weaves the biographies of 'five heroes'.
Matteson immerses readers.
Matteson's (Eden's Outcasts) sweeping collective biography is not a conventional study of the bloody Civil War battle at Fredericksburg, VA. While skillfully conveying the historical importance of the events of December 1862, he focuses on the significance of the battle in the lives of Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., John Pelham, Walt Whitman, Arthur B. Fuller, and Louisa May Alcott.
