a sobering read

Not all information at our pixel outpost in Monterey gets digested from online. Here's an actual tree technology book. I read it last week.

Faust is the president of Harvard, but, I guess, first of all a historian. Don't ask me to borrow it. I'm putting it up on Amazon, whence it came. Got it for half of the listed $28.

An entirely new niche to the war research of 1861-65--the impact of death. We're talking here of 620,000 youthful, mostly, bodies. A few civilians. We're talking here of acres of corpses in summertime.

Not only was the anguish over the death itself, but over the loss of identification. Over half were never identified. So the parents in Vermont, say, didn't know if their son died in Virginia or Kentucky. We would say closure was never possible.

Who picked them up? How and where were they buried? What did the preachers said about death. It sheds light on the context of the Gettysburg Address--by 1965 getting around to respecting the bodies. Let's see, we're the civilized half of the world, right?