finocchio's review against another edition
5.0
I have one of Mr Kantor's first copies. Not only signed by him because it was the first printing given to the author, but inscribed to my grandmother. It is signed by the dedicatee (?), his wife.
hacktrose's review
challenging
dark
emotional
informative
reflective
sad
slow-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Plot
- Strong character development? No
- Loveable characters? No
- Diverse cast of characters? No
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
3.5
tastybourbon's review against another edition
3.0
This was one of the more frustrating reads over the past decade or so for me. It reminded me at times of forcing my way through Rand’s Atlas Shrugged a number of years ago. Much like that title, this book is just too damn long. The author could reduce the work by 200 pages and it would still be a tiring endeavor to make it through.
In some ways, I can understand why some readers give four and five star reviews. Kantor forces you to endure the suffering. This includes the suffering of the Northern captives at the prison, a number of Confederate soldiers, and the local residents. I particularly appreciate that the author displayed how inhumane and cruel the prisoners could be to one another in a setting where it was often about “the survival of the fittest.”
So other than the fact it drones on for too long, what are my issues for the story? For one, a number of the characters lacked depth or any real complexity. There are a few characters who are so shallow and portrayed as being so evil in the story that they’re borderline cartoonish. The author might as well have had these individuals end each sentence with a maniacal laugh while having them twirl their fingers through their ridiculously long mustaches. On the other side of things, there were some characters who were so pure of heart that it was almost gag-inducing. This leads to my greatest concern with the book....
The manner in which slavery is depicted in the book. Ira Claffey, the local farmer, is portrayed as a benevolent slave owner who treats his slaves like they’re family members. But they’re not treated like family members...I don’t force my family members to live in smaller, more basic sheds and cabins in the backyard while paying them nothing for all of the work they do day in day out. The manner in which Claffey is portrayed seems to support the viewpoint of some southern and slavery apologists who try to claim that many slave owners “weren’t so bad.” I wonder if Kantor portrayed Claffey in this manner to sell more copies in the south. To me, the character seems phony and hollow. I would have found it much more realistic if the farmer were portrayed as an owner who could at times be kind and generous to his slaves and at other times be harsh and cruel....as that’s how human beings are, we’re a mixed bag dang it!
Overall, I can’t recommend this book as the story isn’t worth the effort and time investment. I also can’t give it less than 3-stars even though I’m tempted to. Mostly, I’m just tired and glad to be done with the book so that I can move along to something else.
In some ways, I can understand why some readers give four and five star reviews. Kantor forces you to endure the suffering. This includes the suffering of the Northern captives at the prison, a number of Confederate soldiers, and the local residents. I particularly appreciate that the author displayed how inhumane and cruel the prisoners could be to one another in a setting where it was often about “the survival of the fittest.”
So other than the fact it drones on for too long, what are my issues for the story? For one, a number of the characters lacked depth or any real complexity. There are a few characters who are so shallow and portrayed as being so evil in the story that they’re borderline cartoonish. The author might as well have had these individuals end each sentence with a maniacal laugh while having them twirl their fingers through their ridiculously long mustaches. On the other side of things, there were some characters who were so pure of heart that it was almost gag-inducing. This leads to my greatest concern with the book....
The manner in which slavery is depicted in the book. Ira Claffey, the local farmer, is portrayed as a benevolent slave owner who treats his slaves like they’re family members. But they’re not treated like family members...I don’t force my family members to live in smaller, more basic sheds and cabins in the backyard while paying them nothing for all of the work they do day in day out. The manner in which Claffey is portrayed seems to support the viewpoint of some southern and slavery apologists who try to claim that many slave owners “weren’t so bad.” I wonder if Kantor portrayed Claffey in this manner to sell more copies in the south. To me, the character seems phony and hollow. I would have found it much more realistic if the farmer were portrayed as an owner who could at times be kind and generous to his slaves and at other times be harsh and cruel....as that’s how human beings are, we’re a mixed bag dang it!
Overall, I can’t recommend this book as the story isn’t worth the effort and time investment. I also can’t give it less than 3-stars even though I’m tempted to. Mostly, I’m just tired and glad to be done with the book so that I can move along to something else.
scaifea's review against another edition
4.0
Kantor weaves his fictional account of the inmates and jailers of the Andersonville prison camp, along with the lives of families living nearby using actual prison diaries and his own impressive writing skills. This is a good read, but a difficult one; the prose is nearly as bleak as the facts it aims to portray, and rightly so. It's a somber subject that demands a bleak tone.
jessica503's review
5.0
It took me a while to accept this book, with its stark writing and near-absent punctuation. At the end of the day, though, I was left shattered by this fictionalization of the largest US Civil War POW camp and all its horrors.
darrin's review
4.0
I found myself thinking one thing when I started the book and came out on the other side, thinking something else. Let me tackle these thoughts one by one.....
At first the lack of quotation marks bothered me and it made reading kind of off-putting. Coincidentally, however, I also read two other books while engaged in this one, Ali Smith's Autumn and Sok-Yong Hwang's At Dusk, both of which did not use quotation marks to set off spoken language. Ali Smith's book has a lot of qualities of poetry and oftentimes read like poetry and I felt certain that the lack of quotation marks added to this sense so I googled this writing style and sure enough came across an interesting article that made me more comfortable with the whole idea and also made a lot of sense...https://themillions.com/2015/04/unquote-the-benefits-of-excising-quotation-marks.html. I also realized that I speak and read a language that doesn't use punctuation to mark dialogue. Korean uses affixed particles at the end of a verb to indicated quoted speech...a topic too lengthy to get into in this review but the point is, I was already used to this, I just had to tinker with my English language mindset. So the dialogue markers are all there, it is just getting used to the idea of reading a sentence and picking up on the idea that the character is speaking which, after a while, I became comfortable with and was more or less obvious.
Many chapters are prisoner stories...childhood until capture and imprisonment in Andersonville. Several that really stood out for me are the stories of Nathan Dreyfoos, Merry Kinsman, Eben Dolliver and Eric Torrosian. When I would come home at night I would commit to just reading one of these chapters and found many of them engrossing and poignant. If you are reading this book you know they don't end well but I still loved the backstories of who they were as people, how they grew up, their hopes and dreams...unfortunately it reminded me of victims' stories that are published in the media after a mass shooting.
I loved the story of the creation of the regulators and the demise of the raiders...the battle, defeat and ensuing trial of the raiders is one of the best parts of the book. I could say a lot more about the moral and religious questions posed in this part of the book but that will have to be for other reviewers. All the same I thought Kantor really posed some good questions and I thought using Father Peter Whelen's prayer as a refrain in the chapter dealing with the hanging of the raiders was very powerful.
For me, however, the best part of the book was the story of Claffeys and how much their lives were intertwined with the Andersonville stockade from it's inception and building on parts of their property to it's eventual demise at the end of the war. The father and daughter story of Ira and Lucy Claffey holds the book together and becomes the story that ties the book together at the end.
This is a 4.5 for me. There were times that Kantor spent paragraphs drifting off into obscure philosophical thought that early on was sometimes hard to follow but later I found that some of his best writing was contained in these paragraphs. I feel like Kantor had a very good grasp of human motivations and his writing is at times very insightful. He could have, however, said what he wanted to say in a shorter book.
At first the lack of quotation marks bothered me and it made reading kind of off-putting. Coincidentally, however, I also read two other books while engaged in this one, Ali Smith's Autumn and Sok-Yong Hwang's At Dusk, both of which did not use quotation marks to set off spoken language. Ali Smith's book has a lot of qualities of poetry and oftentimes read like poetry and I felt certain that the lack of quotation marks added to this sense so I googled this writing style and sure enough came across an interesting article that made me more comfortable with the whole idea and also made a lot of sense...https://themillions.com/2015/04/unquote-the-benefits-of-excising-quotation-marks.html. I also realized that I speak and read a language that doesn't use punctuation to mark dialogue. Korean uses affixed particles at the end of a verb to indicated quoted speech...a topic too lengthy to get into in this review but the point is, I was already used to this, I just had to tinker with my English language mindset. So the dialogue markers are all there, it is just getting used to the idea of reading a sentence and picking up on the idea that the character is speaking which, after a while, I became comfortable with and was more or less obvious.
Many chapters are prisoner stories...childhood until capture and imprisonment in Andersonville. Several that really stood out for me are the stories of Nathan Dreyfoos, Merry Kinsman, Eben Dolliver and Eric Torrosian. When I would come home at night I would commit to just reading one of these chapters and found many of them engrossing and poignant. If you are reading this book you know they don't end well but I still loved the backstories of who they were as people, how they grew up, their hopes and dreams...unfortunately it reminded me of victims' stories that are published in the media after a mass shooting.
I loved the story of the creation of the regulators and the demise of the raiders...the battle, defeat and ensuing trial of the raiders is one of the best parts of the book. I could say a lot more about the moral and religious questions posed in this part of the book but that will have to be for other reviewers. All the same I thought Kantor really posed some good questions and I thought using Father Peter Whelen's prayer as a refrain in the chapter dealing with the hanging of the raiders was very powerful.
For me, however, the best part of the book was the story of Claffeys and how much their lives were intertwined with the Andersonville stockade from it's inception and building on parts of their property to it's eventual demise at the end of the war. The father and daughter story of Ira and Lucy Claffey holds the book together and becomes the story that ties the book together at the end.
This is a 4.5 for me. There were times that Kantor spent paragraphs drifting off into obscure philosophical thought that early on was sometimes hard to follow but later I found that some of his best writing was contained in these paragraphs. I feel like Kantor had a very good grasp of human motivations and his writing is at times very insightful. He could have, however, said what he wanted to say in a shorter book.
tastybourbon's review
3.0
This was one of the more frustrating reads over the past decade or so for me. It reminded me at times of forcing my way through Rand’s Atlas Shrugged a number of years ago. Much like that title, this book is just too damn long. The author could reduce the work by 200 pages and it would still be a tiring endeavor to make it through.
In some ways, I can understand why some readers give four and five star reviews. Kantor forces you to endure the suffering. This includes the suffering of the Northern captives at the prison, a number of Confederate soldiers, and the local residents. I particularly appreciate that the author displayed how inhumane and cruel the prisoners could be to one another in a setting where it was often about “the survival of the fittest.”
So other than the fact it drones on for too long, what are my issues for the story? For one, a number of the characters lacked depth or any real complexity. There are a few characters who are so shallow and portrayed as being so evil in the story that they’re borderline cartoonish. The author might as well have had these individuals end each sentence with a maniacal laugh while having them twirl their fingers through their ridiculously long mustaches. On the other side of things, there were some characters who were so pure of heart that it was almost gag-inducing. This leads to my greatest concern with the book....
The manner in which slavery is depicted in the book. Ira Claffey, the local farmer, is portrayed as a benevolent slave owner who treats his slaves like they’re family members. But they’re not treated like family members...I don’t force my family members to live in smaller, more basic sheds and cabins in the backyard while paying them nothing for all of the work they do day in day out. The manner in which Claffey is portrayed seems to support the viewpoint of some southern and slavery apologists who try to claim that many slave owners “weren’t so bad.” I wonder if Kantor portrayed Claffey in this manner to sell more copies in the south. To me, the character seems phony and hollow. I would have found it much more realistic if the farmer were portrayed as an owner who could at times be kind and generous to his slaves and at other times be harsh and cruel....as that’s how human beings are, we’re a mixed bag dang it!
Overall, I can’t recommend this book as the story isn’t worth the effort and time investment. I also can’t give it less than 3-stars even though I’m tempted to. Mostly, I’m just tired and glad to be done with the book so that I can move along to something else.
In some ways, I can understand why some readers give four and five star reviews. Kantor forces you to endure the suffering. This includes the suffering of the Northern captives at the prison, a number of Confederate soldiers, and the local residents. I particularly appreciate that the author displayed how inhumane and cruel the prisoners could be to one another in a setting where it was often about “the survival of the fittest.”
So other than the fact it drones on for too long, what are my issues for the story? For one, a number of the characters lacked depth or any real complexity. There are a few characters who are so shallow and portrayed as being so evil in the story that they’re borderline cartoonish. The author might as well have had these individuals end each sentence with a maniacal laugh while having them twirl their fingers through their ridiculously long mustaches. On the other side of things, there were some characters who were so pure of heart that it was almost gag-inducing. This leads to my greatest concern with the book....
The manner in which slavery is depicted in the book. Ira Claffey, the local farmer, is portrayed as a benevolent slave owner who treats his slaves like they’re family members. But they’re not treated like family members...I don’t force my family members to live in smaller, more basic sheds and cabins in the backyard while paying them nothing for all of the work they do day in day out. The manner in which Claffey is portrayed seems to support the viewpoint of some southern and slavery apologists who try to claim that many slave owners “weren’t so bad.” I wonder if Kantor portrayed Claffey in this manner to sell more copies in the south. To me, the character seems phony and hollow. I would have found it much more realistic if the farmer were portrayed as an owner who could at times be kind and generous to his slaves and at other times be harsh and cruel....as that’s how human beings are, we’re a mixed bag dang it!
Overall, I can’t recommend this book as the story isn’t worth the effort and time investment. I also can’t give it less than 3-stars even though I’m tempted to. Mostly, I’m just tired and glad to be done with the book so that I can move along to something else.
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