Americans of the mid-nineteenth century expected to die at home, surrounded by kin who would perform the rituals dying was supposed to involve. Faust shows how four years of war destroyed that expectation. Soldiers died among strangers and enemies, cut off from the women who bore most responsibility for the care of the living and the dead, in numbers no existing arrangement could absorb.

She takes the war's death work apart piece by piece. Killing demanded more of soldiers than dying did, she argues, because it required a sharper break with what they understood themselves to be, as men and as Christians. Burial posed a blunter problem: what to do with the bodies left after Shiloh, Antietam and Gettysburg, which defied both logistics and imagination.

Behind the practical questions sits one Faust keeps returning to, why corpses matter to the living, and what a society discloses about itself in the care it gives them.