Cold Mountain by Charles Frazier
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Book Summary Author: Charles Frazier Edition: Paperback Audio: English (Unknown); English (Original Language); English (Published) Published: 2006-08-31 ISBN: 0802142842 Number of pages: 464 Publisher: Grove Press |
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Book Reviews of the Cold Mountain
Customer 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.