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A review by ncrabb
Andersonville by MacKinlay Kantor
5.0
Some people will grovel in scary ways to get a tiny chance at a ten-dollar Amazon gift card. I'm chief among that crowd. When my public library instituted a winter reading program, entrants to which get a chance at a ten-dollar Amazon card for every entry submitted during a proscribed time, I jumped at it.
These are BINGO cards by reading books with specific categories. If you're familiar with the summer reading program done annually by the Books on the Night Stand podcast, you have a good idea as to how this works. You read books based on specific categories and genres. I chose a book that had won a Pulitzer, since that was a category that completed a BINGO card for me. I've had this book on my hard drive for some months, and since it won the Pulitzer in 1956, it was a great choice.
This is a book that, when you are 99 and tragically enshrouded in the thickest fog of dementia, one of the tiny crystalline tendrils of your memory that will remain is the fact that you read this book, so excellent is it.
Andersonville is arguably the most infamous of the Civil War prison camps on either side. Established in Georgia near the end of the war to hold only a few thousand prisoners, the camp would ultimately hold more than 33,000 who were housed in open-air conditions and guarded by the most evil men the Confederacy could puke up from its foulest darkest places.
Ira Claffey is a slave-owning neighbor to the prison. Three of his sons and his wife are either directly or indirectly killed by the war. Only a tiny handful of his slaves remain, as does a loyal daughter who has fallen in love with a surgeon who knew one of her brothers in the war.
Ira and Lucy watch in horor as prisoners are herded into Andersonville and forced to live in conditions tbat rival or are worse than any third-world slum we could dredge up today. Inside the prison, roving gangs form that strip fellow prisoners of valuables and take lives with abandon. Still other prisoners form a police force and manage to convince Confederate guards to allow trials of the gang members and hang them.
You will be moved to tears numerous times so excellent is Kantor's writing. There are poignant scenes throughout this book, and many of them will remain in your memory long after you finish. You see Georgia through Ira's eyes as he journeys to Richmond to get help for the prisoners. The breakdown of society is much in evidence. Mayhem and refugees are the order of the day, and he ultimately realizes he can't even leave the state, let alone get anywhere else. Dejected by what he sees of a once impressive state and population now broken, he is forced to walk back home over miles having accomplished nothing and yet having accomplished moch. He gives what help he can to the broken and battered refugees he encounters.
The descriptions of the maggot-infested vermin-filled conditions of the camp are neither exaggerated or sensationalizet to titillate the reader, but nor are they reported as merely boring numerical statistics. Instead, they are given human faces and names.
You see the irrelevance of religion in such a place in some ways, and you see how religion actually uplifts a small devout cadre of men in another place. You will be touched by the contrast of the humanitarian Ira and his Confederate neighbors who callously guard the Union soldiers. Kantor creates a rape scene here that is far more remarkably written than any I've seen from more modern authors. You know exactly what happened, but you are left without the mind-numbing brutality that a lesser writer would resort to when describing the event.
There is another incident here in which a Confederate amputee and a Union escapee who lost a hand in the same battle that robbed the Confederate soldier of his foot come together to assist one another as the war draws to its inevitable close. The scene is unforgetable.
I fear I don't always pay attention to awards that books win, partly because there are so many excellent ones out there that don't win awards. But I can understand perfectly why this book was worthy of a Pulitzer. The author put nearly two years of research into the book, and it shows. He quotes from primary sources whenever and however he can. Civilians like Ira and his daughter, Lucy, are fictional. But the hoorors and accounts of the lives needlessly lost and callously taken are real enough.
These are BINGO cards by reading books with specific categories. If you're familiar with the summer reading program done annually by the Books on the Night Stand podcast, you have a good idea as to how this works. You read books based on specific categories and genres. I chose a book that had won a Pulitzer, since that was a category that completed a BINGO card for me. I've had this book on my hard drive for some months, and since it won the Pulitzer in 1956, it was a great choice.
This is a book that, when you are 99 and tragically enshrouded in the thickest fog of dementia, one of the tiny crystalline tendrils of your memory that will remain is the fact that you read this book, so excellent is it.
Andersonville is arguably the most infamous of the Civil War prison camps on either side. Established in Georgia near the end of the war to hold only a few thousand prisoners, the camp would ultimately hold more than 33,000 who were housed in open-air conditions and guarded by the most evil men the Confederacy could puke up from its foulest darkest places.
Ira Claffey is a slave-owning neighbor to the prison. Three of his sons and his wife are either directly or indirectly killed by the war. Only a tiny handful of his slaves remain, as does a loyal daughter who has fallen in love with a surgeon who knew one of her brothers in the war.
Ira and Lucy watch in horor as prisoners are herded into Andersonville and forced to live in conditions tbat rival or are worse than any third-world slum we could dredge up today. Inside the prison, roving gangs form that strip fellow prisoners of valuables and take lives with abandon. Still other prisoners form a police force and manage to convince Confederate guards to allow trials of the gang members and hang them.
You will be moved to tears numerous times so excellent is Kantor's writing. There are poignant scenes throughout this book, and many of them will remain in your memory long after you finish. You see Georgia through Ira's eyes as he journeys to Richmond to get help for the prisoners. The breakdown of society is much in evidence. Mayhem and refugees are the order of the day, and he ultimately realizes he can't even leave the state, let alone get anywhere else. Dejected by what he sees of a once impressive state and population now broken, he is forced to walk back home over miles having accomplished nothing and yet having accomplished moch. He gives what help he can to the broken and battered refugees he encounters.
The descriptions of the maggot-infested vermin-filled conditions of the camp are neither exaggerated or sensationalizet to titillate the reader, but nor are they reported as merely boring numerical statistics. Instead, they are given human faces and names.
You see the irrelevance of religion in such a place in some ways, and you see how religion actually uplifts a small devout cadre of men in another place. You will be touched by the contrast of the humanitarian Ira and his Confederate neighbors who callously guard the Union soldiers. Kantor creates a rape scene here that is far more remarkably written than any I've seen from more modern authors. You know exactly what happened, but you are left without the mind-numbing brutality that a lesser writer would resort to when describing the event.
There is another incident here in which a Confederate amputee and a Union escapee who lost a hand in the same battle that robbed the Confederate soldier of his foot come together to assist one another as the war draws to its inevitable close. The scene is unforgetable.
I fear I don't always pay attention to awards that books win, partly because there are so many excellent ones out there that don't win awards. But I can understand perfectly why this book was worthy of a Pulitzer. The author put nearly two years of research into the book, and it shows. He quotes from primary sources whenever and however he can. Civilians like Ira and his daughter, Lucy, are fictional. But the hoorors and accounts of the lives needlessly lost and callously taken are real enough.