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  • I am in no way proud of the fact that human slavery was a part of our history as a nation, but I was fascinated by this story of Sherman's march through Georgia and the two Carolinas. The characters demonstrated that there are human faces assigned to any war---Pearl, the white offspring of a slave a ... Continue

    I am in no way proud of the fact that human slavery was a part of our history as a nation, but I was fascinated by this story of Sherman's march through Georgia and the two Carolinas. The characters demonstrated that there are human faces assigned to any war---Pearl, the white offspring of a slave and plantation "massah" who nursed ailing soldiers of both sides; the buffoons Arly & Will, who changed in & out of Union and Confederate uniforms whenever it served their purpose; Miz Emily Thompson, a southern belle who took up with a Union doctor after she lost everything; and Sherman, the almighty Union General who machinated the destruction of the south, but cried when he got the news of Willie Hardee's death, son of Confederate Gen. Joseph Hardee. For anyone who loves historical fiction, this is a great read. I would've given it four stars, except about 3/4's way through the book it seemed to get a little bogged down in details of skirmishes that to my way of thinking were unnecessary. But over-all, a great book.

    

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• ― Marion the librarian said on Mar 30, 2009 about the Paperback edition| Add your feedback

In 1864, after Union general William Tecumseh Sherman burned Atlanta, he marched his sixty thousand troops east through Georgia to the sea, and then up into the Carolinas. The army fought off Confederate forces and lived off the land, pillaging the Southern plantations, taking cattle and crops for their own, demolishing cities, and accumulating a borne-along population of freed blacks and white refugees until all that remained was the dangerous transient life of the uprooted, the dispossessed, and the triumphant. Only a master novelist could so powerfully and compassionately render the lives of those who marched.

The author of Ragtime, City of God, and The Book of Daniel has given us a magisterial work with an enormous cast of unforgettable characters–white and black, men, women, and children, unionists and rebels, generals and privates, freed slaves and slave owners. At the center is General Sherman himself; a beautiful freed slave girl named Pearl; a Union regimental surgeon, Colonel Sartorius; Emily Thompson, the dispossessed daughter of a Southern judge; and Arly and Will, two misfit soldiers.

Almost hypnotic in its narrative drive, The March stunningly renders the countless lives swept up in the violence of a country at war with itself. The great march in E. L. Doctorow’s hands becomes something more–a floating world, a nomadic consciousness, and an unforgettable reading experience with awesome relevance to our own times.

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NY Times Notable Book Club (332)

• American Civil Warhistorical fictionNovelsAmericafictionhistorymilitaryabraham lincolncivil war