SJane

This is the first book of academic non-fiction I’ve read in a long time. The author writes well and, since we’re all preoccupied with death, the topic is fascinating. Still, as much as I enjoyed it, I did find the book haunted by creeping academia, ie one has to be redundant to prove one’s thesis, and to push some points beyond their usefulness.

I did like what I learned about the role of newspapers at the time in helping people hunt information and report it. The part about the fashion of mourning could have gone on forever and I wouldn’t have gotten bored. The hostility taken out on corpses, the nascent idea of national cemeteries for soldiers, the slave perspective, the statistics – much of that was new to me and I was thankful to learn it.

In terms of literature, the author pulled Walt Whitman and Ambrose Bierce into the book very well, and the information on popular, non-literary writing was an enlightening reflection of the times. But I became impatient with the pages spent on Emily Dickinson. A couple of valid points could have been made on a page or two, without the author going into Dickinson’s linguistic and syntactical oddities as being influenced by the Civil War. As intriguing as the idea is, it felt out of place in this book. That as an instance of creeping academia – that urge to make the point all over the place –the book might have been better without.

There aren’t any surprises regarding history or death itself, “the good death,” or the role of religion or patriotism. The book’s beauty and impact is in its cumulative effect. As you’re confronted with anecdote after anecdote of suffering, bereavement and innocence, it’s hard not to be moved to sobs.