A Worse Place than Hell, John Matteson
A Worse Place than Hell, John Matteson
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A Worse Place than Hell
How the Civil War Battle of Fredericksburg Changed a Nation

Author: John Matteson

Narrator: David Colacci

Unabridged: 21 hr

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Published: 07/06/2021

Synopsis

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.

About John Matteson

John Matteson received the Pulitzer Prize for Biography for Eden's Outcasts: The Story of Louisa May Alcott and Her Father and the Ann M. Sperber Prize for The Lives of Margaret Fuller. A Distinguished Professor of English at John Jay College of Criminal Justice and the editor of The Annotated Little Women, he resides in the Bronx.

Reviews

Goodreads review by Bill on April 30, 2024

I can almost picture the wheels turning in Matteson’s head as he conceived the idea for this book. As a biographer of both Louisa May Alcott and Margaret Fuller, he would have been well aware of the connections that each had to the Civil War’s Battle of Fredericksburg, via Alcott’s brief service as......more

Goodreads review by Christopher on June 09, 2021

John Matteson's A Place Worse Than Hell examines the lives of five Americans intersecting at the Civil War Battle of Fredericksburg in December 1862. Among them are Louisa May Alcott, whose brief but traumatic service as a Union Army nurse after the battle inspired her first novel (Hospital Sketches......more

Goodreads review by Patrick on December 29, 2021

The book, at its core, is not one about the Battle of Fredericksburg, rather Fredericksburg is a literal and figurative meeting place for a nuanced discussion about the American experience at the moment of the Civil War ... the participants in that discussion are soldiers and poets, parents and prea......more

Goodreads review by Joseph on February 27, 2022

Although this book was advertised as being about the battle of Fredericksburg, it was more than anything about some of the people involved in the battle. While I expected a boring monograph that described the fighting, what I got instead was a look at some of the greatest figures of the mid 19th cen......more

Goodreads review by Evan on June 19, 2021

Book 25 of 50 for 2021. Inspired by the Pulitzer Prize winning author and my own current proximity to Fredericksburg, I thoroughly enjoyed this book because of both its civil war history but also the in depth look at Oliver Wendell Holmes, Louise May Alcott, and Walt Whitman.......more

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