Living hell

Many Americans, argues Michael C. C. Adams, think of the Civil War as more glorious, less awful, than the reality. Tourists flock to battlefields, their perceptions of the war often shaped by reenactors who work hard for verisimilitude but who cannot ultimately simulate the horrors of war. In Living Hell, Adams uses the voices of actual participants on the firing line or in the hospital ward to create a virtual historical reenactment. Perhaps because the United States has not seen conventional war on its own soil since 1865, the collective memory has faded, so that we have sanitized and…