A Poignant Assessment of Our Ugly Civil War Toll
A review by Karen Long
Drew Gilpin Faust grew up in the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia, visiting the cairns and killing fields of the Civil War. She is 60 now, the president of Harvard University, and still makes time to go to the graves of individual soldiers who died for the Union and Confederate causes. A respected historian of the South, Faust put 10 years into the making of her sixth book, This Republic of Suffering, an examination of how the annihilation of more than half a million Americans in the Civil War transformed survivors, civic institutions and the nation. It's a remarkable work -- poised, moving, irrigated with the flowing voices of mid-19th-century Americans. Their journals, letters, accounts, songs, sermons and scribblings have the gravitas to reach us across 14 decades, to touch upon our own preoccupations with an unexpectedly long war and the nature of national sacrifice. Then, as now, "the blow seems heaviest when it strikes down those who are in the morning of life," as...
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Previously Reviewed by Cleveland Plain Dealer
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Signed, Mata Hari by Yannick Murphy
 "I cheated death."
So begins the sensual, accomplished novel, Signed, Mata Hari, and so this historical figure did. Ninety years after the French executed her as a World War I spy, the exotic dancer haunts popular culture, high and low. Her name graces a chain of supermarkets in Indonesia, and...
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