Cold Mountain by Charles Frazier Summary and Reviews
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Book Reviews of Cold Mountain
Book Review: Okay, I changed my mind...
Summary: 5 Stars
I didn't want to read this book. I picked it up because my daughter was required to read it prior to starting high school, and I figured I'd keep her company. And as anyone following my tweets can attest, I hated it. I cursed it for being boring, cursed the school for assigning a book that could turn kids off of reading indefinitely. The degree to which my opinion of the book has since changed is almost comical.
Cold Mountain tells the story, usually in alternating chapters, of Inman, a Confederate soldier, and the woman he loves, Ada. When the book opens, Inman is in a hospital in North Carolina, having been shot in the neck in fighting outside of Petersburg, Virginia. When he's reasonably recuperated--his wound yet a supurating sore but no longer likely to kill him--he determines to walk home rather than return to the army, a trek that means months of hardship and could end in his being captured or shot by the Home Guard, who are on the hunt for deserters. Ada, for her part, is back home facing her own difficulties, the hard business of surviving, for which she has been woefully unprepared. The life stories of the various characters whom the two meet are woven into the narrative as well, so that the book is larger in scope than it would be if it were only focused on Inman and Ada.
A summary of the book can't possibly do it justice. In telling the small story of Inman and Ada, Cold Mountain manages to tell a much larger one: it describes the life of the average man in the South during the Civil War years, the grueling work that mere survival required. But against a miserable backdrop, the difficulties imposed by nature and by the cruelty of one's fellows, hope remains possible. And redemption.
So I'm no longer cursing Frazier's masterpiece (though I still think the early part about Inman's friendship with Swimmer would best be omitted). Nor am I cursing my daughter's assignment. In fact, I'm impressed that her school assigned a book that is not only challenging but also often indelicate. This is refreshing in world that is so often politically correct to the point of madness.
-- Debra Hamel
Book Review: Once more, with feeling
Summary: 4 Stars
I wrote this review when the book was brand new, but am just now getting around to posting some of my older stuff. My take then: "It's time for GONE WITH THE WIND to move over, the Civil War has finally produced a great novel. This story of a perilous journey across North Carolina and an equally difficult journey of the heart rings far truer than other accounts of the era, and affirms ones faith in modern readers (many months a best seller) and the literary establishment (National Book Award). My enthusiasm for Frazier's first novel is doubtless reinforced by the setting, these mountains I have chosen as home, which he paints in telling detail. Frazier's war is not heroic but brutally pointless. The protagonists only wish to survive into a better time."Book Review: PACE!!--PACE!!--PACE!!
Summary: 1 Stars
I'M NOT SURE IF I AM ALLOWED TO USE THE WORD ""PACE"" IN A REVIEW.
WELL--HERE GOES---
THIS WAS THE SLOWEST, DRAGGING, BORING BOOK I HAVE EVER READ.
""ATLAS SHRUGGED"" FLEW BY---BY COMPARISON.
AND---IT SHOULD HAVE BEEN LONGER---BY ABOUT 80 TO 100 PAGES, I'D SAY.
WHEN INMAN DIES---THAT FUNERAL / BURIAL WOULD HAVE LASTED PAGE AFTER
PAGE AFTER PAGE AFTER . . .
Book Review: Racist Revisionism
Summary: 1 Stars
I originally purchased this novel because it was required reading for a grad class I was taking on Civil War literature. What was the instructor thinking? What was the AUTHOR thinking?
I don't see how other reviewers could be bored by this. I was livid. Yes, those who criticize the author's poor wording and lousy literary technique are correct, but how does that compare to an historical novel about the American Civil War that somehow forgets to include 6 million black people?
Wait. Make that five thousand, nine hundred, ninety-nine. There IS that moment when a slave tosses (wait for it...) a WATERMELON off the back of a wagon for our starving protagonist. Then he is gone again, and we are left focusing on white folk, as the writer clearly believes we should be.
On the surface, this is a love story about a po' Southern lad who is dragged away from his beloved in order to go to war, and returns, half-starved, AWOL, and lovelorn.
The overriding message, however, is that neither the Union nor the Confederacy was right or wrong. The whole thing was a terrible misunderstanding that could have been averted. This is pure claptrap, and for more than one reason.
First, the war was not a misunderstanding. The Northerners in Congress tried to end slavery as Britain did, by compensating the slave owners in order to set them free without financial loss. The slave owners wouldn't sell; there's no misunderstanding in that.
Second, since the war WAS about slavery, (not just in terms of right and wrong, but also in terms of whether the south would remain feudal, or whether it would advance, and the slaves join the workers in the north) unless you truly believe that slavery should have been permitted as long as southern white power brokers liked it, there IS a right side, and there IS a wrong side. If there was ever a war in American history worth fighting and dying for, this one was it, and the writer instead makes it sound senseless and meaningless.
I puzzled over what to do with my copy of Cold Mountain. I have never believed in book-burning, no matter how distasteful the material. If I gave it to charity, some poor fool might read it and be wrongly persuaded. Finally, I realized its true potential: I saved it for my history lectures and when I told students that any historian who tries to tell the story of the Civil War without mentioning black people was not to be trusted, I threw this book on the floor, HARD. It woke the students up quite nicely, and the abuse I heaped on this book--bought with my own money, after all, not the school district's--makes me feel much better.
If you want to toss a few bucks at a book that is badly written and historically misrepresentative, this should be its ultimate destination. On a frustrating day, you have something to throw, something to stomp on, something to mutilate. If you don't want to buy an item for that purpose, I'd advise you to save your money and for Civil War history, stick to Shaara and Foote...but never, no never Charles Frazier.
Book Review: Room for forgiveness
Summary: 4 Stars
In this Civil War South so richly drawn by Charles Frazier, every creature -- man or beast -- knows many enemies.
Horses must be shot to conceal how they came to be riderless. Squirrels become food in times of scarcity. A young goat, petted in a scene of domestic tranquility, is soon drained of its blood and roasted. A flogging rooster is divested of his foul temper, and with it his head.
But the greatest foe of all is, of course, the war itself. Men and boys leave their families to die. Women and babies left behind know little comfort and cower in fear of every knock upon the door. If a Confederate soldier endures beyond a battle and moves homeward, he lives in danger of those who would call him deserter. And those who would give him haven are not much safer.
But among the ravaged landscape, there is also room for forgiveness and healing. A father prone to drink and abandonment earns his daughter's love. And the memory of a stolen moment fuels one man with the drive to go on. To return, for whatever time he can, to the land he knows and the comfort of a woman's touch.