Mr. March, in Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women, heads south to fight the Confederacy at the opening of Alcott’s novel and returns on Christmas a year later. This is Brooks’ imaginings of what March would have encountered as an idealistic preacher from Concord heading into the heart of a Civil War. Not surprisingly, he learns war is hell, slavery is worse, racism is painfully ugly and not the sole purview of southerners, and that his personal attempts at action and intervention are pitifully ineffective. Look, if you are going to read a book about slavery, by all means begin with Andrea Levy’s The Long Song, the recounting of slave life and uprisings in Jamaica. Levy’s characters are real people. Brooks’ has an interesting idea — she won a Pulitzer Prize for this book — but like most of her books the characters in March are uni-dimensional, interesting in a TV sort of way, but utterly forgettable as soon as the book is completed.
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Gettysburg by Stephen W. Sears
According to the Times, Jay Winik, “Sears’s reconstruction is “The Civil War equivalent of a modern spy satellite photograph. He hovers above the action, giving us a panoramic view.”
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Confederates in the Attic: America’s Unfinished Civil War by Tony Horwitz *** (of 4)
A nice Jewish boy from the D.C. suburbs treks across the south meeting Civil War re-enactors, Daughters of the Confederate States of America, poor-whites with rebel flags flapping from their pick-up trucks and discovers not only hasn’t the Civil War ended in the south, but on the contrary, since the days of integration following the Civil Rights legislation of the 60s, positions on race and north vs. south issues have in fact hardened. This is NOT a dry textbook, but rather a largely humorous, respectful travelogue and visit with people I find repulsive. The author does, too, sometimes, in the same way, say, a Jonathan Raban (a Brit) did when he motored down the Mississippi like Huck Finn only to discover the middle of America was filled with overweight Americans sprawled on folding lawn chairs atop pontoon boats. The only reason the book doesn’t get four stars is it’s about 75 pages too long. Nevertheless, I unreservedly recommend reading the first 275-300 pages. June, 2005.
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The Civil War by Bruce Catton **** of 4
I listened to it on tape. It’s a short history of the Civil War. Gettysburg takes about six minutes. The Monitor and Merrimack about two. What makes the book so good, beyond the suspenseful writing (I didn’t know who was going to win the Civil War until the very end of the book), is the multiple perspectives Catton brings to view the war by. He examines the different economies of North and South, the Navies, their alliances, and electoral politics. That means the battles, which so many books focus on, are placed in a much wider context and are not given undue weight. May, 2005
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The March by E.L. Doctorow **** (of 4)
The march is General William Tecumsah Sherman’s subjugation of the confederacy as seen through the eyes of carefully crafted, wholly believable, fictitious characters: freed-slaves, plantation owners, plantation wives, army physician, dirt-poor soldiers, and the historical figures they interact with. The plot is compelling and the story-telling is vintage Doctorow, a page turner. August 2007.