Recommended Read: A Worse Place than Hell by John Matteson

First, a proviso: The jacket blurb, ‘How The Civil War Battle Of Fredericksburg Changed A Nation’ is blatant hyperbole, misleading and a publisher’s (Norton) play to author Matteson’s previous Pulitzer Prize win; note to the alerted:

He ain’t gonna win a Pulitzer here.

But it is a good book with plenty of meat on the bone and lots of new information that I as a Civil War military history bug found fascinating and intriguing. It is a worthy read.

It features five people, five personalities caught up in the time of the War Between The States at the confluence of the battle of Fredericksburg. They were all there, directly or indirectly, though they never encountered one another. And they were all unique and distinguishable and notable.

Some are still remembered. Some have faded into oblivion.

They were: Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., Louisa May Alcott, Walt Whitman, Chaplain Arthur Fuller and a brilliant Confederate Artillerist John Pelham from Alabama .

Their biographies are woven in and out of the Civil War narrative with Fredericksburg as the pivot point.

All five make for solid, interesting page turning time.

You will learn new things.

Of note, the book’s title implies that the Battle of Fredericksburg was ‘A Worse Place Than Hell’; that too is misleading. The title comes from an Abraham Lincoln quote during times spent anguishing over a brewing political cabal within his cabinet and a number of Hobson’s Choices as he wrestled with the issuance and timing of The Emancipation Proclamation. He, with his typical wisdom and a good bit of good fortune, untied his Gordian Knots with the great help of Union generals like Grant who no longer hesitated before the presumed invinsible Lee and the South.

The last fifty pages or so seem hurried and turns into a mishmash of psycho-babble and musings about mindsets and thinkings, no doubt spurred by that not-very-much fun moment that sometimes hits the best of authors: How do I wrap this thing up? It was at this point I skimmed as I knew how to wrap this thing up.

Nonetheless, this is a pretty good one. Read it with a sharp eye.

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