{"title":"Michael C C Adams","description":null,"products":[{"product_id":"fighting-for-defeat-book-michael-c-c-adams-9780803210356","title":"Fighting for Defeat","description":"Fighting for Defeat argues that the Union army's lack of success in the eastern theater early in the Civil War was due largely to its fear that the Confederate army was invincible. Certain to arouse discussion, this study by Michael C. C. Adams combines probing social and psychological analysis, blood-rushing description of events, and candid pictures of President Lincoln, and Generals George McClellan and Ulysses Grant, among many others. It was first published in 1978 with the main title Our Masters the Rebels.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"GB \/ LIKE_NEW \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":49584282992913,"sku":"GOR013264719","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"GB \/ WELL_READ \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":49652357693713,"sku":"GOR013160239","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"US \/ VERY_GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":52613270372625,"sku":"CIN0803210353VG","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/0803210353.jpg?v=1751233081"},{"product_id":"living-hell-book-michael-c-c-adams-9781421412214","title":"Living Hell","description":"Many Americans, argues Michael C. C. Adams, tend to think of the Civil War as more glorious, less awful, than the reality. Millions of tourists flock to battlefields each year as vacation destinations, their perceptions of the war often shaped by reenactors who work hard for verisimilitude but who cannot ultimately simulate mutilation, madness, chronic disease, advanced physical decay. In Living Hell, Adams tries a different tack, clustering the voices of myriad actual participants on the firing line or in the hospital ward to create a virtual historical reenactment. Perhaps because the United States has not seen conventional war on its own soil since 1865, the collective memory of its horror has faded, so that we have sanitized and romanticized even the experience of the Civil War. Neither film nor reenactment can fully capture the hard truth of the four-year conflict. Living Hell presents a stark portrait of the human costs of the Civil War and gives readers a more accurate appreciation of its profound and lasting consequences. Adams examines the sharp contrast between the expectations of recruits versus the realities of communal living, the enormous problems of dirt and exposure, poor diet, malnutrition, and disease. He describes the slaughter produced by close-order combat, the difficulties of cleaning up the battlefields-where tens of thousands of dead and wounded often lay in an area of only a few square miles-and the resulting psychological damage survivors experienced. Drawing extensively on letters and memoirs of individual soldiers, Adams assembles vivid accounts of the distress Confederate and Union soldiers faced daily: sickness, exhaustion, hunger, devastating injuries, and makeshift hospitals where saws were often the medical instrument of choice. Inverting Robert E. Lee's famous line about war, Adams suggests that too many Americans become fond of war out of ignorance of its terrors. Providing a powerful counterpoint to Civil War glorification, Living Hell echoes William Tecumseh Sherman's comment that war is cruelty and cannot be refined. Praise for Our Masters the Rebels: A Speculation on Union Military Failure in the East, 1861-1865. \"This excellent and provocative work concludes with a chapter suggesting how the image of Southern military superiority endured in spite of defeat.\" (Civil War History). \"Adams' imaginative connections between culture and combat provide a forceful reminder that Civil War military history belongs not in an encapsulated realm, with its own categories and arcane language, but at the center of the study of the intellectual, social, and psychological currents that prevailed in the mid-nineteenth century.\" (Journal of American History). Praise for The Best War Ever: America and World War II: \"Adams has a real gift for efficiently explaining complex historical problems.\" (Reviews in American History). \"Not only is this mythologizing bad history, says Adams, it is dangerous as well. Surrounding the war with an aura of nostalgia both fosters the delusion that war can cure our social ills and makes us strong again, and weakens confidence in our ability to act effectively in our own time.\" (Journal of Military History).","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"GB \/ VERY_GOOD \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":49763235299601,"sku":"GOR005775938","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"US \/ WELL_READ \/ SBYB","offer_id":50374159794449,"sku":"CIN1421412217A","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"US \/ VERY_GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":51452457746705,"sku":"CIN1421412217VG","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"US \/ GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":52106428678417,"sku":"CIN1421412217G","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/1421412217.jpg?v=1750921942"},{"product_id":"best-war-ever-book-michael-c-c-adams-9780801846977","title":"The Best War Ever","description":"The most readable-and searingly honest-short book ever written on this pivotal conflict. Was World War II really such a good war? Popular memory insists that it was, in fact, the best war ever. After all, we knew who the enemy was, and we understood what we were fighting for. The war was good for the economy. It was liberating for women. A battle of tanks and airplanes, it was a cleaner war than World War I. Although we did not seek the conflict-or so we believed-Americans nevertheless rallied in support of the war effort, and the nation's soldiers, all twelve million of them, were proud to fight. But according to historian Michael C. C. Adams, our memory of the war era as a golden age is distorted. It has left us with a misleading-even dangerous-legacy, one enhanced by the nostalgia-tinged retrospectives of Stephen E. Ambrose and Tom Brokaw. Disputing many of our common assumptions about the period, Adams argues in The Best War Ever that our celebratory experience of World War II is marred by darker and more sordid realities. In the book, originally published in 1994, Adams challenges stereotypes to present a view of World War II that avoids the simplistic extremes of both glorification and vilification. The Best War Ever charts the complex diplomatic problems of the 1930s and reveals the realities of ground combat: no moral triumph, it was in truth a brutal slog across a blasted landscape. Adams also exposes the myth that the home front was fully united behind the war effort, demonstrating how class, race, gender, and age divisions split Americans. Meanwhile, in Europe and Asia, shell-shocked soldiers grappled with emotional and physical trauma, rigorously enforced segregation, and rampant venereal disease. In preparing this must-read new edition, Adams has consulted some seventy additional sources on topics as varied as the origins of Social Security and a national health system, the Allied strategic bombing campaign, and the relationship of traumatic brain injuries to the adjustment problems of veterans. The revised book also incorporates substantial developments that have occurred in our understanding of the course and character of the war, particularly in terms of the human consequences of fighting. In a new chapter, The Life Cycle of a Myth, Adams charts image-making about the war from its inception to the present. He contrasts it with modern-day rhetoric surrounding the War on Terror, while analyzing the real-world consequences that result from distorting the past, including the dangerous idea that only through (perpetual) military conflict can we achieve lasting peace.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"US \/ GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":50159927066897,"sku":"CIN0801846978G","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"US \/ VERY_GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":50571561861393,"sku":"CIN0801846978VG","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"US \/ WELL_READ \/ SBYB","offer_id":51323852030225,"sku":"CIN0801846978A","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/B00ENKR77W.jpg?v=1751361701"},{"product_id":"best-war-ever-book-michael-c-c-adams-9781421416670","title":"The Best War Ever","description":"He contrasts it with modern-day rhetoric surrounding the War on Terror, while analyzing the real-world consequences that result from distorting the past, including the dangerous idea that only through (perpetual) military conflict can we achieve lasting peace.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"US \/ VERY_GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":50173052125457,"sku":"CIN1421416670VG","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"US \/ GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":52106447028497,"sku":"CIN1421416670G","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"GB \/ VERY_GOOD \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":52109153304849,"sku":"GOR006861739","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"US \/ WELL_READ \/ SBYB","offer_id":53707021713681,"sku":"CIN1421416670A","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/1421416670.jpg?v=1750756619"},{"product_id":"best-war-ever-book-michael-c-c-adams-9780801846960","title":"The Best War Ever","description":"In this work, historian Michael Adams suggests that the public memory of World War II is distorted and that the war has left America with a misleading - even dangerous - legacy. Challenging many popular assumptions about the period, Adams argues that the American experience of World War II was positive but also disturbing, creating problems that continue to affect the US today. Combat was so brutal and demanding that 98 per cent of the men who were in action for more than 30 days suffered breakdowns; some American tanks and submarines were inferior to Axis models; despite heroic fighting by black units, officially sanctioned racism kept Army facilities rigorously segregated. At one point in the Italian campaign, VD cases outweighed battlefield wounds. Censorship was strict - if journalists didn't censor themselves, the government did it for them. In short, suggests Adams, World War II was everything that war is; violent, uncertain, costly and an arena for the best - and worst - of human behaviour.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"US \/ GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":52100192862481,"sku":"CIN080184696XG","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/9780801846960.jpg?v=1757088722"},{"product_id":"living-hell-book-michael-c-c-adams-9781421421452","title":"Living Hell","description":"Surrounding the war with an aura of nostalgia both fosters the delusion that war can cure our social ills and makes us strong again, and weakens confidence in our ability to act effectively in our own time.-Journal of Military History","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"US \/ VERY_GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":52152587387153,"sku":"CIN1421421453VG","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"US \/ GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":52819282985233,"sku":"CIN1421421453G","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/9781421421452.jpg?v=1757617154"}],"url":"https:\/\/www.worldofbooks.com\/en-au\/collections\/author-books-by-michael-c-c-adams.oembed","provider":"World of Books ","version":"1.0","type":"link"}