Zandbroz Variety
420 Broadway, Fargo, ND 58102
Store Hours
Monday-Saturday
10 a.m - 6.pm
Pulitzer Prize–winning author John Matteson illuminates three harrowing months of the Civil War and their enduring legacy for America.
December 1862 drove the United States toward a breaking point. The Battle of Fredericksburg shattered Union forces and Northern confidence. As Abraham Lincoln’s government threatened to fracture, this critical moment also tested five extraordinary individuals whose lives reflect the soul of a nation. The changes they underwent led to profound repercussions in the country’s law, literature, politics, and popular mythology. Taken together, their stories offer a striking restatement of what it means to be American.
Guided by patriotism, driven by desire, all five moved toward singular destinies. A young Harvard intellectual steeped in courageous ideals, Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. confronted grave challenges to his concept of duty. The one-eyed army chaplain Arthur Fuller pitted his frail body against the evils of slavery. Walt Whitman, a gay Brooklyn poet condemned by the guardians of propriety, and Louisa May Alcott, a struggling writer seeking an authentic voice and her father’s admiration, tended soldiers’ wracked bodies as nurses. On the other side of the national schism, John Pelham, a West Point cadet from Alabama, achieved a unique excellence in artillery tactics as he served a doomed and misbegotten cause.
A Worse Place Than Hell brings together the prodigious forces of war with the intimacy of individual lives. Matteson interweaves the historic and the personal in a work as beautiful as it is powerful.
Zandbroz Variety
Since 1989
About Us
ZANDBROZ VARIETY
Since 1989
In 1988, Jeff and Greg Danz had a dream. They would open a store that they would want to shop. So they bought an empty turn of the century building in the heart of downtown Sioux Falls, South Dakota. The brothers spent a year restoring the building and developing the concept for what would become Zandbroz Variety. When the doors opened in May of 1989, Zandbroz was a bookstore with an eclectic mix of other inventory, an old fashioned soda fountain and coffee bar. The store was a hit and a couple of years later a second location was opened in Fargo, ND. Zandbroz Variety started in a world before Barnes and Noble, Starbucks and internet shopping were part of the landscape. That of course all changed and so too Zandbroz has evolved and changed –THIRTY years later and we are still here!
Store Hours
Monday-Saturday
10 a.m - 6.pm