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.
Random House
September 2005
384 pages ISBN: 0375506713 Hardcover Add to Wish List
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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