About 57,000 books have been published on the American Civil War so what possibly could be left to explore ?
Quite a bit, it turns out, particularly regarding the bloodiest battle of the war and in American history, Antietam. In one day of savage fighting, Sept. 17, 1862, an estimated 6,500 soldiers were killed and at least 15,000 wounded.
In 291 brisk, fact-stuffed but engaging, thought-provoking pages, ''A Day in September'' by Stephen Budiansky examines how ill-prepared we as a nation were for war, but more significantly, what we learned and how those advances led to better military training, rapid improvements in battlefield medical care and the beginnings of a reconciling of the differences in North and South society, values and beliefs.
Some key American institutions at the outbreak of the Civil War were astonishingly primitive and Antietam revealed just how bad. Pre-Civil War, for example, most graduates of the U.S. Military Academy were well-schooled in math and engineering, much less so in military tactics.
Many soldiers lacked even rudimentary training such as target shooting. Militias often behaved like fraternal organizations or a mob, Budiansky writes.
Medical care was primitive. For example, most doctors of the Civil War era did not understand how disease was transmitted. Treatment of the wounded at Antietam typically was chaotic; drivers charged with taking wounded to field hospitals often were drunk, the book observes.
What might have made the book even more engaging would be to carry the lessons learned from these failings to the present day.
For example, can we resolve our current differences peacefully ?
