URL: http://www.nytimes.com SUBJECT

1140 of 1231 DOCUMENTS

The New York Times
January 27, 2008 Sunday

Late Edition - Final

The Coming Wave of Gadgets That Listen and Obey
BYLINE: By MICHAEL FITZGERALD.

Michael Fitzgerald writes about business, technology and culture. E-mail: mfitz@nytimes.com

SECTION: Section BU; Column 0; Money and Business/Financial Desk; PROTOTYPE; Pg. 3
LENGTH: 1175 words
INNOVATION usually needs time to steep. Time to turn the idea into something tangible, time to get it to market, time for people to decide they accept it. Speech recognition technology has steeped for a long time: Mike Phillips remembers that in the 1980s, when he was a Carnegie Mellon graduate student trying to develop rudimentary speech recognition systems, ''it seemed almost impossible.''

Now, devices that incorporate speech recognition are starting to hit the mass market, thanks to entrepreneurs like Mr. Phillips. He is the chief technology officer and a co-founder of the Vlingo Corporation, an 18-month-old start-up in Cambridge, Mass., that is selling services to cellular carriers and other software companies that want to give their customers the ability to let their mouths do the walking -- and the searching.

Vlingo's service lets people talk naturally, rather than making them use a limited number of set phrases. Dave Grannan, the company's chief executive, demonstrated the Vlingo Find application by asking his phone for a song by Mississippi John Hurt (try typing that with your thumbs), for the location of a local bakery and for a Web search for a consumer product. It was all fast and efficient. Vlingo is designed to adapt to the voice of its primary user, but I was also able to use Mr. Grannan's phone to find an address.

The Find application is in the beta test phase at AT&T and Sprint. Consumers who use certain cellphones from those companies can download the application from vlingo.com.

Mr. Phillips has spent more than 15 years in the trenches at companies that nourished speech recognition. In 1994, he was one of the founders of Speechworks, which made early interactive voice-response systems, the now-ubiquitous automated services that answer when we call a company. In 2000, Speechworks was acquired by ScanSoft, which five years later bought Nuance Communications, keeping Nuance as the name. Mr. Phillips left that year to work at M.I.T. as a visiting researcher.

In 2006, he and a colleague from ScanSoft, John Nguyen, started Vlingo because they thought that speech recognition technology, cellular networks and phones were all becoming powerful enough to allow voice navigation systems on cellphones. ''We couldn't have done this five years ago,'' he says.

Now, Mr. Phillips is in a race for market share. Another start-up, Yap Inc., based in Charlotte, N.C., is running a beta test of its service, which is similar to Vlingo's but already has text messaging. Igor and Victor Jablokov, Yap's co-founders, decided to start the company because they saw their teenage sister text-messaging while in a car.

She wasn't driving at the time, but Igor Jablokov says cellular companies tell him in meetings that two-thirds of their teenage customers have either sent or read a text message while behind the wheel.

Big companies are also attracted to this market. Nuance started its Nuance Voice Control system last August, the same month that Vlingo's appeared. Nuance's system is in use at Sprint and Rogers Communications and can be downloaded to 66 models of hand-held phones, with many more on the way.

Microsoft is a significant potential competitor, thanks in part to its purchase of TellMe Networks last March. TellMe offers a speech-driven search application for cellphones that is available to customers of AT&T -- only those who were part of Cingular before the merger -- and Sprint. TellMe's system is built-in on the new Mysto phone from Helio, a mobile phone operator started by Earthlink and SK Telecom, and is the engine for 1800call411, a free directory information service.

Over all, speech recognition was a $1.6 billion market in 2007, according to Opus Research, which predicts an annual growth rate of 14.5 percent over the next three years. Dan Miller, an analyst at Opus, said that companies that have licensed speech recognition technology would probably see faster revenue growth, as more consumers used the technology. The cellphone market holds the most potential, given its billions of phones, but cellular providers are still working out the business model for such services.

Igor Jablokov, Yap's chief executive, says that he wants his application to be supported by advertising, but that the carriers with whom he is negotiating, which he declined to name, want to charge customers for the service.

To be sure, speech recognition technology has been available on personal computers since 2001 in applications like Microsoft Office, but few people use it. But in cellphone and other markets, speech recognition ''is on the cusp of a curve,'' says Bill Meisel, editor of Speech Strategy News, an industry newsletter.

Speech recognition, already used in high-end G.P.S. systems and luxury cars from Cadillac and Lexus, is now spreading to less expensive systems and cars -- witness those slapstick Ford Sync commercials, featuring vignettes like one showing a young woman who approaches her office building and says ''door open,'' expecting it to respond the way her car does. It doesn't, and she and her coffee cup smack directly into it.

Sync was developed by Microsoft and Ford, and based on Nuance technology. And the speech technology chief at I.B.M. Research, David Nahamoo, says the company has an automotive customer testing speech recognition to help drivers find songs quickly while driving -- no more pushing buttons.

Then there's SimulScribe, a New York company that is one of several businesses using speech recognition to convert voice mail into e-mail. ''Voice recognition has finally hit the point where someone like ourselves can take it over the hump for specific applications,'' says James Siminoff, SimulScribe's chief executive.

James R. Glass, a principal research scientist at the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory at M.I.T., says speech technology ''is going to end up everywhere speech can be useful.'' He says machines will keep improving their ability to recognize the way humans naturally talk, even if they have strong accents, and that the technology will find myriad new uses.

THIS doesn't mean that people will always choose to speak. Genevieve Bell, director of user experience at the digital home group of Intel, says people are unlikely to want to use speech recognition to handle their finances, at least in public spaces. It also may not work well in the living room.

Ms. Bell jokes that if she could, she would yell ''cricket!'' at the television anytime she walked into a room, so her favorite sport would appear on the screen.

Even a digital expert like her cautions that some people may never be satisfied with the quality of speech recognition technology -- thanks to a steady diet of fictional books, movies and television shows featuring machines that understand everything a person says, no matter how sharp the diction or how loud the ambient noise. But soon we will be able to speak our minds to many of our machines, and have them obey our commands.

URL: http://www.nytimes.com
SUBJECT: VOICE RECOGNITION (91%); MOBILE & CELLULAR COMMUNICATIONS (88%); WIRELESS TELECOMMUNICATIONS CARRIERS (88%); TELECOMMUNICATIONS SERVICES (88%); TEST MARKETING (88%); WIRELESS INDUSTRY (76%); ENTREPRENEURSHIP (75%); SOFTWARE MAKERS (69%); SEARCH ENGINES (68%); BAKERIES (51%); TEXT MESSAGING (74%); MOBILE & CELLULAR TELEPHONES (88%); COMPUTER SOFTWARE (74%)
GEOGRAPHIC: CHARLOTTE, NC, USA (51%) NORTH CAROLINA, USA (79%); MASSACHUSETTS, USA (76%) UNITED STATES (79%)
LOAD-DATE: January 27, 2008
LANGUAGE: ENGLISH
GRAPHIC: ILLUSTRATION (ILLUSTRATION BY CATHY HULL)
PUBLICATION-TYPE: Newspaper

Copyright 2008 The New York Times Company

1141 of 1231 DOCUMENTS

The New York Times
January 27, 2008 Sunday

Late Edition - Final

Old-School Economics
BYLINE: By CHRISTOPHER CALDWELL.

Christopher Caldwell is a contributing writer for the magazine.

SECTION: Section MM; Column 0; Magazine; THE WAY WE LIVE NOW; Pg. 11
LENGTH: 948 words
Why do presidential candidates touting their concern for the economy pose with factory workers rather than with ballet troupes? After all, the U.S. now has more choreographers (16,340) than metal-casters (14,880), according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. More people make their livings shuffling and dealing cards in casinos (82,960) than running lathes (65,840), and there are almost three times as many security guards (1,004,130) as machinists (385,690). Whereas 30 percent of Americans worked in manufacturing in 1950, fewer than 15 percent do now. The economy as politicians present it is a folkloric thing.

If Republicans have had more luck talking about the economy for the last generation or so, it is because they were the less folkloric of the two parties. Broadly speaking, they cut taxes and regulation and trusted that entrepreneurs would hasten the arrival of the economy to come. There were Democrats who did the same, but they shared a party with others who were nostalgic for a disappearing world, reflexively backing unions and fighting management. Republican optimism beat Democratic nostalgia.

This campaign season, Republicans no longer look so confident. Mike Huckabee suggested to a group of Detroit executives that ''instead of talking to people in the corporate boardroom, you talk to people on the line.'' He aspires to remind Americans ''of the guy they work with, not the guy who laid them off.'' The latter guy, in Huckabee's view, resembles Mitt Romney, who may have triumphed in Michigan, but only after promising to restore 250,000 factory jobs lost to layoffs. Republican rhetoric about trusting the transition to a new economy is not allaying fears as it once did.

The reason is simple. It is that the transition is over. The new economy we have been promised is in place. While the economy of 1998 was a world away from the Internet-less, land-line-dependent, non-Nafta, I.B.M.-Selectric-powered, partly Communist world of 1988, today's economy is fully recognizable as the one we inhabited in 1998.

Today's economic anxiety is not the same anxiety that simmered between 1980 and 2000. Back then, recessions and slowdowns were understood as the pangs of a new economy struggling to be born. But the recession we now seem to be entering is to the information age what the recession of, say, 1957-1958 was to the industrial age -- a ''normal'' recession in the midst of an economy with stable bases, an economy that (to use a current cliche) ''is what it is.'' The ''jobs of the future'' that were promised 20 years ago are here. Choreographers, blackjack dealers and security guards have replaced factory workers as the economy's backbone, if not yet its symbol.

New economies have always required a kind of initiation fee of those who would participate fully in them. As the historian Richard Hofstadter showed in ''The Age of Reform,'' the aftermath of the Civil War was marked by paeans to the prosperity that would arise from technological change. The 19th-century farmer went to great lengths to join it. ''His demand for expensive machinery,'' Hofstadter wrote, ''his expectation of higher standards of living and his tendency to go into debt to acquire extensive acreage created an urgent need for cash and tempted the farmer into capitalizing more and more on his greatest single asset: the unearned appreciation in the value of his land.'' These problems will be familiar to many a 21st-century security guard or Wal-Mart cashier. They are the problems not of someone ''left behind'' in the old economy but of someone struggling in the new.

Economic orders have life cycles. Policies designed to ''unleash'' business in a fledgling economy offer diminishing returns in a developed one. To have overregulated or overtaxed Bill Gates 20 years ago might have killed a goose that still had many golden eggs to lay. But it seems probable that 20 years hence, regardless of tax policy, Microsoft will be intact, thriving, based in the United States and doing roughly what it is doing now.

Yet Republican prescriptions have changed not a whit. Mitt Romney recently attacked the latest federal energy bill, which mandates average fuel-efficiency of 35 miles per gallon, as an impediment to Detroit's ability to crank out sport-utility vehicles. He is quite right. But does he mean to say we're going to get out of our economic doldrums by driving 10-mile-a-gallon cars in a world of $100-a-barrel oil?

All Republican candidates want to make President Bush's deep tax cuts permanent, and even to expand on them. Rudolph Giuliani has promised to pass the largest tax cut in U.S. history. But this is yesterday's policy trying to pass itself off as tomorrow's. Americans are evenly split on whether taxes ought to be raised back to pre-Bush levels. Large majorities would gladly pay more in taxes for various purposes (notably more access to health care). Voters, it seems, have begun asking of entrepreneurs and their champions what they asked of hippies around 1971: Aren't you liberated enough already?

Cutting taxes and slashing regulations were appropriate strategies for managing a transitional economy. But we no longer live in such an economy. This does not mean that Republicans need to embrace a single-payer health system or subsidized day care. But neither can they go on automatically favoring the hypothetical needs of tomorrow's entrepreneurs over the real needs of today's dental hygienists and landscape gardeners. The future is now, as the late Redskins' coach George Allen used to say. The promise that prosperity is just one more tax cut or one more rescinded regulation away is a rapidly depreciating rhetorical asset.

URL: http://www.nytimes.com
SUBJECT: US PRESIDENTIAL ELECTIONS (90%); US PRESIDENTIAL CANDIDATES 2008 (90%); US DEMOCRATIC PARTY (90%); POLITICAL CANDIDATES (90%); FACTORY WORKERS (90%); US REPUBLICAN PARTY (90%); POLITICAL PARTIES (90%); DANCE (90%); ARTISTS & PERFORMERS (89%); RECESSION (89%); ECONOMIC NEWS (89%); NEW ECONOMY (89%); LAYOFFS (78%); MACHINE TOOLS (78%); US FEDERAL GOVERNMENT (78%); LABOR SECTOR PERFORMANCE (77%); GAMING (76%); LABOR DEPARTMENTS (73%); STATISTICS (72%); TAX LAW (68%); BALLET (78%)
ORGANIZATION: BUREAU OF LABOR STATISTICS (84%)
PERSON: MICHAEL HUCKABEE (68%); MITT ROMNEY (54%)
GEOGRAPHIC: DETROIT, MI, USA (79%) MICHIGAN, USA (79%) UNITED STATES (94%)
LOAD-DATE: January 27, 2008
LANGUAGE: ENGLISH
GRAPHIC: PHOTO: Gallery Stock (PHOTOGRAPH BY STEPHEN SHORE)

CHART: WORK IN PROGRESS: Numbers of employees in selected professions. (Source: Occupational Employment Statistics survey, Bureau of Labor Statistics

Chart by Charles M. Blow)
PUBLICATION-TYPE: Newspaper

Copyright 2008 The New York Times Company

1142 of 1231 DOCUMENTS

The New York Times
January 27, 2008 Sunday

Late Edition - Final

Shades of the Muckrakers
BYLINE: Reviews by MARILYN STASIO
SECTION: Section BR; Column 0; Book Review Desk; CRIME; Pg. 22
LENGTH: 918 words
The shades of Frank Norris and Upton Sinclair must have been looking over Loren D. Estleman's shoulder when he wrote GAS CITY (Forge, $24.95). Set in a Midwestern metropolis that grew up around a refinery, his muscular novel initially takes a long view of the cynical bargain struck between civic leaders and organized crime -- and only moves in for the kill when a key figure in this devil's dance decides to reform. Like earlier muckraking writers, Estleman is always looking for the tipping point where our frontier values of independent entrepreneurship and community justice tumble into criminality. And his characters never stop asking whether it's possible to go back and get it right.

Everyone in Gas City seems to be in on the deal that keeps crime and vice confined to 10 downtown blocks, well away from the commercial and residential districts. Francis X. Russell, the corrupt chief of police, is actually best friends with the mob boss Tony Z. But when Russell's beloved wife dies, he goes into mourning for the lost ideals of the generations of immigrants who built his working-class city and resolves to make peace with his conscience. Police raids close down the most notorious criminal establishments. Illicit income dries up for gangsters and cops on the take. Fortunes shift in the coming mayoral race.

But once the delicate power-sharing mechanism held by Gas City's legal and illegal bosses breaks down, so does municipal order. At this point, Estleman has to ask whether one crooked cop's personal reformation is worth the chaos it causes. It's a loaded question, since the author has made individual (and perhaps national) redemption his central theme, even to the whimsical point of extending it to a serial killer known as Beaver Cleaver, who has shifted his pattern of butchery. (''My theory,'' a criminal profiler says, ''is he's trying to cut down, like a smoker or an alcoholic tapering off his intake until he's beaten the addiction.'') While this parallel plot isn't entirely integrated into the main story, it lets more raffish downtown characters into the mix, adding their irreverent voices to the higher debate over how much it profits a man to build a shining city and lose his faith in himself.

Before she loses her nerve in a way that a true queen of the night (like Ruth Rendell or her alter ego, Barbara Vine) never would, Minette Walters spins a gripping tale of suspense in THE CHAMELEON'S SHADOW (Knopf, $24.95). Sticking to her habitual method of storytelling, Walters draws all eyes to Lt. Charles Acland, a 26-year-old British soldier who is gravely injured but escapes death after his armored vehicle is obliterated by terrorist bombs in Iraq. From the time he's first met, badly disfigured and sullenly silent on a hospital ward, Acland commands our attention, which only intensifies as he reveals the anger, grief, guilt and rage that torment him.

Walters's portrait of this wounded soldier is so persuasively shaded that when he comes under suspicion as a serial killer we're forced to examine the existential question of whether a personality can truly be destroyed -- and what that says about military combat. Unhappily, the story's sensationalism undermines this character study, while the procedural format, with its routine police work and inept cops, only distracts from the deeper issues this psychological thriller raises.

The perverse tones of Madeline Dare rake their fingernails across the mental blackboard in THE CRAZY SCHOOL (Grand Central, $23.99). And how nice it is to hear that rebel voice again. After making her nervy debut in ''A Field of Darkness,'' Cornelia Read's renegade debutante took to the hills of New England, and here she is in 1989 in the Berkshires, teaching at the Santangelo Academy, a ''therapeutic boarding school'' for the troubled progeny of the filthy rich. In addition to appealing to ''all manner of seekers and lost boys, wild girls and pagan sprites,'' and those misguided souls who would teach them more practical social skills, the region also attracts a murderer who kills two students and makes the deaths look like a double suicide. Only the iconoclastic Madeline, who really cares about her vulnerable charges, is skeptical enough to see through the sham. While hardly taxing, the whodunit plot is funny and twisted, and it gives Madeline plenty of opportunities to air her caustic views on the evolutionary decline of her social class.

As alluring as it is disorienting, THE RISK OF INFIDELITY INDEX (Atlantic Monthly, $22) introduces American readers to Christopher G. Moore's exotic private-eye mysteries set in Bangkok and featuring an American expatriate named Vincent Calvino. While hard-pressed to maintain his own moral ballast within this permissive society, Calvino has a sense of irony that allows him to work for ex-pat wives who want sordid proof of their husbands' infidelity in the Thai capital, which ranks No. 1 internationally as the ''hub of marriage destruction.'' But this cynical private eye also has a streak of integrity (and a need for cash) that compels him to take up the cause of a client who was murdered when he tried to expose a case of drug piracy so far-reaching it could bring down the government. Although the tone of the narrative is slightly off -- the general satire seems a bit too blunt, and downright mean in its specific consideration of those ex-pat wives -- Moore's flashy style successfully captures the dizzying contradictions of this vertiginous landscape.
URL: http://www.nytimes.com
SUBJECT: BOOK REVIEWS (90%); ORGANIZED CRIME (90%); CITY LIFE (78%); POLICE FORCES (78%); NOVELS & SHORT STORIES (77%); POLICE MISCONDUCT (77%); MAYORS (75%); TERRORISM (71%); HOMICIDE (76%); BOMBS & EXPLOSIVES (64%); MURDER (56%); ENTREPRENEURSHIP (55%)
GEOGRAPHIC: IRAQ (79%)
TITLE: Gas City (Book)>; Chameleon's Shadow, The (Book)>; Crazy School, The (Book)>; Risk of Infidelity Index, The (Book)>; Gas City (Book)>; Chameleon's Shadow, The (Book)>; Crazy School, The (Book)>; Risk of Infidelity Index, The (Book)>
LOAD-DATE: January 27, 2008
LANGUAGE: ENGLISH
GRAPHIC: DRAWING (DRAWING BY WES DUVALL)
PUBLICATION-TYPE: Newspaper

Copyright 2008 The New York Times Company

1143 of 1231 DOCUMENTS

The New York Times
January 27, 2008 Sunday

Late Edition - Final

Death's Army
BYLINE: By GEOFFREY C. WARD.

Geoffrey C. Ward, the author of ''The War: An Intimate History 1941-1945,'' is at work on ''A Disposition to Be Rich,'' about a nefarious ancestor, the swindler Ferdinand Ward.

SECTION: Section BR; Column 0; Book Review Desk; Pg. 8
LENGTH: 1328 words
THIS REPUBLIC OF SUFFERING

Death and the American Civil War.

By Drew Gilpin Faust.

Illustrated. 346 pp. Alfred A. Knopf. $27.95.

During the Civil War, my great-great-grandfather, a Presbyterian clergyman, served as chaplain to the 104th New York Infantry Regiment. He was a man of stern moral conviction and in weekly letters to his parishioners back home allowed little to escape his censorious eye. President Lincoln's erratic church attendance irritated him. So did mud and heat and the ''intemperance'' and ''profanity'' that he believed were the ''great sins of our army,'' and he was infuriated by the proximity of his quarters to the ''tents of several of the most blasphemous, immoral persons I ever heard.'' But in the aftermath of Gettysburg, words failed him. ''Sad scenes!'' was all he could write after two days spent officiating at the trench burials of Union and Confederate boys. ''I have no time, strength nor heart to recall and narrate what I have seen!''

Little wonder. Some 7,000 corpses lay scattered across the Pennsylvania countryside, alongside more than 3,000 dead horses and mules -- an estimated six million pounds of human and animal flesh, swollen and blackening in the July heat. For weeks afterward, townspeople carried bottles of peppermint oil to neutralize the smell.

Americans had never endured anything like the losses they suffered between 1861 and 1865 and have experienced nothing like them since. Two percent of the United States population died in uniform -- 620,000 men, North and South, roughly the same number as those lost in all of America's other wars from the Revolution through Korea combined. The equivalent toll today would be six million.

The lasting but little-understood impact of all that sacrifice is the subject of Drew Gilpin Faust's extraordinary new book, ''This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War.'' ''Death created the modern American union,'' she writes, ''not just by ensuring national survival, but by shaping enduring national structures and commitments.'' And she continues: ''The work of death was Civil War America's most fundamental and most demanding undertaking.'' Her account of how that work was done, much of it gleaned from the letters of those who found themselves forced to do it, is too richly detailed and covers too much ground to be summarized easily. She overlooks nothing -- from the unsettling enthusiasm some men showed for killing to the near-universal struggle for an answer to the question posed by the Confederate poet Sidney Lanier: ''How does God have the heart to allow it?''

She begins with what she calls the ''work'' of dying. The faithful looked forward to what was called a Good Death, with time to see the end approaching, accept it and declare to friends and family members their belief in God and his promise of salvation. The battlefield brutally truncated that serene process, and soldiers and their families alike worried about what that might mean for their chances in the afterlife. Survivors tried to provide reassurance. When one Union soldier was killed during the siege of Richmond, a comrade told his mother that while her boy had died instantly and without the opportunity to declare his faith, he had told his fellow soldiers the previous summer that he ''felt his sins were forgiven & that he was ready and resigned to the Lord's will & while talking he was so much overjoyed that he could hardly suppress his feelings of delight.'' But sometimes candor trumped comfort: one Georgia soldier worried in a letter home that while his dying brother had ''said that he hoped he was prepared to meet his God in a better world than this,'' he was also aware ''he had been a bad, bad, very bad boy.''

When the war began, the Union Army had no burial details, no graves registration units, no means to notify next of kin, no provision for decent burial, no systematic way to identify or count the dead, no national cemeteries in which to bury them. The corpses of officers often received special treatment, boxed up and sent home in what one entrepreneur advertised as ''METALLIC COFFINS ... Warranted Air-Tight'' that could ''be placed in the Parlor without fear of any odor escaping therefrom.'' Dead enlisted men were generally just wrapped in blankets and buried where they died. Officers ''get a monument,'' a Texas soldier wrote, ''you get a hole in the ground and no coffin.'' Men going into combat were issued no identification tags. One soldier made sure he always carried a used envelope ''somewhere about me so that if killed in battle my friends might know what became of me.''

Undertakers and embalmers followed the armies. ''If you could only make him breathe, Professor,'' an officer exclaimed as he watched an embalmer work over a Union corpse.

''Ah,'' the man answered, ''then there would be money made.''

Fathers and brothers wandered battlefields in search of missing relatives. So did wives and mothers dressed in black. Private ''agents'' promised to search for missing men in exchange for a percentage of their widows' pensions. Spiritualists made a good living conveying vague but consoling messages from the Other Side.

In 1862, Congress empowered the president to purchase grounds for ''a national cemetery for the soldiers who shall die in the service of their country'' but provided him with no funds with which to buy it. By war's end, there were just five such cemeteries, three established by Union generals in the western theater, and two -- Antietam and Gettysburg -- paid for by states from which many of those killed there had come. Only after the war was over -- and amid news reports that vengeful Southerners were desecrating Union graves -- did Congress finally provide a national solution to what had become a national need. The Union dead were to be gathered from scores of Southern battlefields, identified when possible, then re-interred in burial grounds to be protected and maintained by the federal government. The ghastly work went on for six years, much of it performed by African-American soldiers. When the last body was reburied in 1871, 303,536 Union soldiers had been laid to rest in 74 national cemeteries at a cost of $4 million. Almost half remained nameless. ''Such a consecration of a nation's power and resources to a sentiment, the world has never seen,'' wrote one of the officers charged with recovering the bodies.

Confederate corpses were barred. A Northern reporter walking a Southern battlefield stumbled upon the unburied skeletons of two soldiers. His local guide examined their uniform buttons. ''They was No'th Carolinians,'' the man explained. ''That's why they didn't bury 'em.'' Southern women saw to it that the Southern dead were reburied, but many of those who'd been hastily covered with earth during Confederate forays into the North were never found. As late as 1996, spring rains were still uncovering their bones near Gettysburg.

''The war's staggering human cost demanded a new sense of national destiny,'' Faust, now the president of Harvard University, writes, ''one designed to ensure that lives had been sacrificed for appropriately lofty ends.'' Frederick Douglass thought freeing the slaves should have provided the ''sacred significance'' of all that loss. But, Faust continues, ''the Dead became what their survivors chose to make them,'' and as the decades passed and memories blurred, ''assumptions of racial hierarchy would unite whites North and South in a century-long abandonment of the emancipationist legacy.'' In the end most Americans of my great-great-grandfather's generation -- and their successors -- allowed their shared memories of suffering to ''establish sacrifice and its memorialization as the ground on which North and South would ultimately reunite.'' We might wish, with Frederick Douglass, that they had decided otherwise, but Drew Gilpin Faust's profoundly moving book helps us understand why they did not.

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