Two Books That Deal With the Battle of Gettysburg Could Win 2008 National Book Awards on Wednesday, 145th Anniversary the Gettysburg Address

I’ve been covering book awards for a long time, and I can’t recall having seen a coincidence like this one: Two books that reconsider the Battle of Gettysburg could win National Book Awards on Wednesday, the 145th anniversary of the Gettysburg Address www.nationalbook.org. On the nonfiction shortlist: Drew Gilpin Faust’s This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War, which deals in part with the creation during the war of a new kind of cemetery at Gettysburg and other battle sites – a burial ground intended not just to dispose of bodies but to “memorialize the slain and celebrate the nation’s fallen heroes.” Among the poetry finalists: Frank Bidart’s Watching the Spring Festival, a collection that includes “To the Republic,” in which fallen Union and Confederate soldiers accuse the U.S. of having betrayed their sacrifices at Gettysburg.

© 2008 Janice Harayda. All rights reserved.