Gettysburg: A Meditation on War and Values [Hardcover]

Kent Gramm (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: February 1994

"It is the most original and thought-provoking work on the battle of Gettysburg in a long time."- 'Journal of American History". "You feel yourself standing alongside the Iron Brigade as they make a determined effort to hold off the troops from North Carolina and Tennessee. We are left to ponder what motivated such courage from these common men of uncommon valor."- "Civil War". "This splendid book is a must for anyone who has visited Civil War battlefields and wondered who those people were and how we relate to them today."- "Infantry". "...this is a remarkable work, full of brightness and invention and maybe even genius. Mr. Gramm is a poet; he has taken the cathartic event of our history and given it his touch of philosophic insight...Books like this don't come along very often."- Jim Trulock. "This is a most brilliant and unusual, indeed unique, book."- "Alan Nolan". "Gettysburg" is a book about values - the values of the Civil War generation and those we live by today. Theirs was a generation willing to die in great numbers for a principle as abstract as union. What motivated them? What have we done with the heritage that they bequeathed to us? This book asks whether America in the 1990s knows what its present character, economics, and society cost, and whether the country's present battles have as noble a purpose and as hopeful a prospect as the great cataclysm of July 1863, the Battle of Gettysburg. Walt Whitman perhaps said it best: "Will the America of the futureNwill this vast, rich Union ever realize what itself cost back there, after all?" Gramm also presents a new perspective on the importance of the first day's battle, reassesses the tactical impact of new weaponry, examines in light of battlefield statistics the famous defense of Little Round top, re-evaluates the thinking of Robert E. Lee, looks to Walt Whitman and Abraham Lincoln for explanations as to why the nation fought at all, and illuminates such lesser-known heroes as John F. Reynolds, John Buford, A. A. Humphreys, Joseph Kershaw, Freeman McGilvery, John Bigelow, and William Dorsey Pender.

Product Details

• Hardcover: 288 pages
• Publisher: Indiana University Press; First Edition edition (February 1994)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0253326214
• ISBN-13: 978-0253326218
• Product Dimensions: 9.4 x 6.4 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.5 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 3.4 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (11 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,710,367 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

15 of 16 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Social Critique + Gettysburg? Yep- and it WORKS!, July 2, 2000

By 

Bradley Stone (Chicago, IL USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Gettysburg: A Meditation on War and Values (Paperback)

Kent Gramm's, "Gettysburg- A Meditation on War and Values", is the oddest "war" book I've ever read- and the most wonderful. Gramm's novel approach posits the Battle of Gettysburg as a lens through which to view contemporary society for the purpose of examining two basic questions: "Are we better off today than we were in the Civil War era?" and "Have we earned the sacrifice that those soldiers made?" In Gramm's opinion, we fall woefully short of positive answers to both of them.

Gramm attempts to show that we have squandered both the ideals and the dreams those men fought for through a combination of purposeful action and outright indifference. We have, he argues, fallen headlong into a morass of thoughtless materialism. The result of our tumble is an unforgivable lack of any sense of nobility in our society on either the collective or individual level. Whether or not one agrees with the author's conclusions, they are argued cogently and with tremendous passion, and are, at a minimum, quite thought-provoking.

Gramm's history is as well-done as his sociology, rendered in a semi-conversational style that is eminently readable, informative, and entertaining. His accounts of events and people from the Battle of Gettysburg are fascinating and spot-on, with the effect of making his social critique that much more moving (his brief study of Confederate general Dorsey Pender is especially effective in that sense).

"Gettysburg" is a brilliant book that not all will find to be such- if one prefers his history "straight up", Gramm's approach will likely be rather annoying. But for anyone willing to try history "with a twist", written from what is clearly a deep reservoir of feeling and experience, this book will prove to be a treasure.

At the very beginning of "Gettysburg", Gramm justifies his whole approach with a Thoreau quote: "...it is the province of the historian to find out not what was, but what is." Perhaps it is the province of the reader of history to do the same.

9 of 9 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A unique attempt to explain the meaning of Gettysburg., March 13, 2004

By A Customer

This review is from: Gettysburg: A Meditation on War and Values (Hardcover)

I spent many years living within an hour of Gettysburg, and I've probably been there close to 100 times. This is the first book I've ever seen that comes close to explaining what the subjective experience of visiting the battlefield is like.

The book is essentially a series of essays tied together by the Gettysburg battlefield, past and present. The theme running through the book is the enormity of the loss of lives that occurred there. To some, this theme might appear as an overtly political statement of pacifism. However, Gramm's target is the cheap patriotism and glorification of war that avoids comprehension of the nature of war and its aftermath. While he attacks the party-like atmosphere that surrounded the First Gulf War, he speaks reverentially of the people who fought it, as well as a more general attestation to the sacrifices of men who go to war in his account of the history of the units that made up the Iron Brigade, up through World War II. The first few pages of the book are an accurate representation of the content of the remainder of the book, although the recounting of the story is a bit more basic in these pages.

This is not necessarily a book about the history of the battle, the battlefield, or the debates that still rage about the actions and personalities of the commanders of the battle. While the story of the battle is sufficiently told to orient someone unfamiliar with the battle, and while there are accounts that will likely be new to even the more hardcore enthusiasts (e.g. his parallel telling of the story of Gen. Pender and his wife, and Gen. Reynolds and his fiancee), it is not as a history that this book has its value. The reason this book deserves a place on the shelf of essential books about Gettysburg is that it offers an intensely personal and relevant reflection on what the battle was and is about. It is a story of all wars, of why men go, and what is done to them. Rarely have I seen a book that tells it better.

8 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars A Book With Feeling, March 27, 2000

By 

S.E. Davis (East Galesburg, Illinois USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Gettysburg: A Meditation on War and Values (Hardcover)

To any person who has visited the Gettysburg battlefield and experienced its spiritual quality, this book is definitely for you. This book brought back the rush of visiting the battlefield with a crushing force. The author describes the battlefield in terms of sight, sound, smell, and sometimes touch in such detail that a past visit is recalled and an additional visit is desired. Anyone who is anticipating a visit to Gettysburg would find this a useful preparatory source. The locations and geographic aspects of the battle are vividly described. The only down side of the book is that detailing some of the author's "Values" which I find a curious combination of sixties liberalism and latterday pessimism. I found the historical analysis of the battle to be accurate but challenging to many of the commonly held tenets which are printed about the Civil War and the battle. More than anything else, the author's love and reverence of the Gettysburg National Park flows out of this book like a river.