Michael C.C. Adams (The Best War Ever) throws aside the image of gallant pageantry often associated with the American Civil War to reveal its grimmest realities in Living Hell. He ignores the grand campaign strategies and national politics, focusing instead on individuals and the traumas they endured. Adams follows soldiers through the recruitment process, the vice and grime of camp life, the horrors of the battlefield and its aftermath, on through the years of postwar physical and psychological anguish, often suffered in isolation or ridicule. Finally, he turns to the plight of civilians, including the hundreds of thousands of widows and orphans left in the war's wake.
Living Hell uses firsthand accounts and Adams's own extensive research to create a shockingly unflinching view of the war. It is not for the squeamish, with graphic descriptions of battlefield mutilations, primitive surgeries, mass corpse disposal and an incessant stream of upsetting violations of human dignity. Yet Living Hell is far more than a sadistic chronicle of these horrors; it provides a vital gut-wrenching counterpoint to the Civil War's glamorization in America's collective memory, a perspective as important to understanding the war as any political history or general's biography.
Living Hell will appeal to lovers of military history while being accessible enough for general readers. Those with the fortitude to endure its darkest moments will find it fascinating, though not necessarily enjoyable. --Tobias Mutter, freelance reviewer