The Seventh Well: A Novel by Fred Wander translated by Michael Hofmann (Norton, 160 pages, $23.95) This is an utterly beautiful novel about life in Nazi concentration camps, but the author, Fred Wander, nevertheless portrays the horror of those camps….

This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War By Drew Gilpin Faust (Knopf, 346 pages, $27.95) “The number of soldiers who died between 1861 and 1865, an estimated 620,000, is approximately equal to the total American fatalities in…