A Worse Place than Hell Audiobook By John Matteson cover art

A Worse Place than Hell

How the Civil War Battle of Fredericksburg Changed a Nation

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A Worse Place than Hell

By: John Matteson
Narrated by: David Colacci
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Pulitzer Prize-winning author John Matteson illuminates three harrowing months of the Civil War and their enduring legacy for America.

December 1862 drove the United States toward a breaking point. The Battle of Fredericksburg shattered Union forces and Northern confidence. As Abraham Lincoln's government threatened to fracture, this critical moment also tested five extraordinary individuals whose lives reflect the soul of a nation. The changes they underwent led to profound repercussions in the country's law, literature, politics, and popular mythology. Taken together, their stories offer a striking restatement of what it means to be American.

Guided by patriotism, driven by desire, all five moved toward singular destinies. A young Harvard intellectual steeped in courageous ideals, Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. confronted grave challenges to his concept of duty. The one-eyed army chaplain Arthur Fuller pitted his frail body against the evils of slavery. Walt Whitman, a gay Brooklyn poet condemned by the guardians of propriety, and Louisa May Alcott, a struggling writer seeking an authentic voice and her father's admiration, tended soldiers' wracked bodies as nurses. On the other side of the national schism, West Point cadet John Pelham achieved a unique excellence in artillery tactics as he served a doomed and misbegotten cause.

©2021 John Matteson (P)2021 HighBridge, a division of Recorded Books American Civil War Art & Literature Authors Military Wars & Conflicts Civil War War Thought-Provoking
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This is one of the most beautifully written books I've ever read. It's not a war story, but a human story ,which incidentally, is the best way to tell a war story. I can't say enough good things about this book

Beautifully Artistic.

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Fantastic stories and fantastic research.. all I can really say is this is an instant classic.

Brilliant

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I absolutely love how the story wove these individuals into a story that was compellingly connected.

Great contrast

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What a fantastic story! The weaving together of these 5 lives intertwined in and around the end of the Battle of Sharpsburg meeting together and affected by the December battle at Fredericksburg. Soldiers and non combatants woven together in a story of the American Civil War.

Fantastic Story

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You will enjoy this intertwining of great Americans. It will inspire and touch your heart.

Fantastic Intertwining!

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Amazing that all those lives were around the same time period. Never again has it happened that we were blessed with such.

Very good!

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I already knew ahead of time it wasn't a military history, but it being pretty much the only lengthy audiobook specifically covering the Battle of Fredericksburg, I went in anyway, not knowing exactly how the Battle itself would feature in what is essentially a minibiography of 6 people.


when I was in college studying history, military history often has the negative reputation of being the "dumb" type of history, soft and easy and more focused on action and fighting and "tacticool" rather than on anything really important regarding history or its development.


This is a fair assessment a lot of the time, and I haven't found a lot of authors who wrote military history books who were bold enough to sidetrack from the marching and maneuvering to go into sociopolitical aspects surrounding battles or its lasting effects on regional cultures.


this particular book seems to switch this a bit; it is not a military history, but when the time comes for battle it is bold enough to sidetrack from the literary analyses of Walt Whitman or the complicated theology driving Arthur Fuller to give us good solid marching and maneuvering and musketfire.


what was particularly interesting about this book is that while it focuses on 5-6 particular individuals, most of them individually are not covered for their own particular lives but for what they represent in terms of the new archetypes of Americans being forged by the war.


he is very explicit with this in regards to Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr, whose beginning as a very stoic new england aristocrat ends up being the attribute that most drives him through the war. his belief in more than just accepting status quo (as many of his contemporaries did in their tepid responses to secession) and his taking up of the high-minded ideals of freedom keep him coming back to his regiment again and again after repeated heinous injuries until his comrades are all but begging him to stay home and retire from the service with honor.


The other major character covered in depth is Walt Whitman, with probably the most background information and detail given as to his journey. he didn't fight in the war but ended up traveling to multiple battlefields and hospitals to provide aid and comfort to wounded soldiers, an experience that ends up being very heavy with homosexual undertones (and which makes gale boetticher from "breaking bad"'s association of Whitman with Walter White much more understandable) and an odd sort of emergent patriotism which ends up painfully reminiscent of modern day when he becomes disillusioned by the post-war decline of art and thought and instead a fanatical devotion to making money at all costs.


Going over the biographies of every major figure would make this review too long but it is fascinating how all of them, either in their lives or by their death, come to represent not just the post-war American psyche, but how their contemporary lives would shape the way history would be told (John Pelham becoming a Lost Cause neo-confederate martyr in particular)


Despite the choice of advertising the book around the Battle of Fredericksburg (although it is the one location where all the major characters are physically closest to one another), the battle itself does not figure heavily in the work itself. In fact several times a chapter that began at Fredericksburg will drift along up to Gettysburg or even deep into the 1870s only for the next chapter to start again back in Fredericksburg.


aside from some occasional rambling and excessive attention paid to Walt Whitman's poetry, this is a masterful book about the Civil War's role in shaping the very idea of America, at least from the perspective of the five chosen subjects

not a military history

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