A Worse Place than Hell: How the Civil War Battle of Fredericksburg Changed a Nation

John Matteson

Jul 2021 · Highbridge Audio · Narrated by David Colacci

About this audiobook

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 the author

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, he resides in the Bronx.

David Colacci has been an actor and a director for over thirty years, and has worked as a narrator for over fifteen years. He has won AudioFile Earphones Awards, earned Audie nominations, and been included in Best of the Year lists by such publications as Publishers Weekly, AudioFile magazine, and Library Journal.