Living Hell

The Dark Side of the Civil War

By: Michael C.C. Adams

Narrated by: Mitch Crawford

Many Americans, argues Michael C. C. Adams, tend to think of the Civil War as more glorious, less awful, than the reality. In Living Hell, Adams tries a different tack, clustering the voices of myriad actual participants on the firing line or in the hospital ward to create a virtual historical reenactment.

Neither film nor reenactment can fully capture the hard truth of the four-year conflict. Living Hell presents a stark portrait of the human costs of the Civil War and gives listeners a more accurate appreciation of its lasting consequences.

Adams examines the sharp contrast between the expectations of recruits versus the realities of communal living, the enormous problems of dirt and exposure, poor diet, malnutrition, and disease. He describes the slaughter produced by close-order combat, the difficulties of cleaning up the battlefields, and the resulting psychological damage survivors experienced.

Drawing extensively on letters and memoirs of individual soldiers, Adams assembles vivid accounts of the distress Confederate and Union soldiers faced daily: sickness, exhaustion, hunger, devastating injuries, and makeshift hospitals where saws were often the medical instrument of choice.

©2014 Johns Hopkins University Press (P)2023 Tantor

It’s OK

The book does provide an unvarnished unromantic look at the realities of the American Civil War. But at times it sort of descends into an endless litany of examples. How many different eyewitness accounts of horrific wounds do you really need to get the point? However, the worst thing about this book is the narration. The narrators sing song style does not fit the tone of the material. Also, whoever told him to do a southern accents when reading quotes from Confederates did a grave disservice to readers. The the narrator only has one (bad) southern accent and so Robert E. Lee sounds exactly like an Alabama farm kid. This, as the kids would say, is super cringe.