Living Hell: The Dark Side of the Civil War

Michael C.C. Adams

Sep 2023 · Tantor Media Inc · Narrated by Mitch Crawford

About this audiobook

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.

About the author

Michael C. C. Adams, Regents Professor of History Emeritus at Northern Kentucky University, is the author of The Best War Ever and Our Masters the Rebels: A Speculation on Union Military Failure in the East, 1861-1865, winner of the Museum of the Confederacy's Jefferson Davis Prize for the best Civil War book.

A high school teacher for twenty years in history, economics, fine arts, and computer science, Mitch Crawford now works as an actor, model, and voice-over artist. His sincere, trustworthy voice resonates well with children's literature, first- and third-person POV fiction, nonfiction, biography/memoir, and self-help books.