Nashville 1864: The Dying of the Light : A Novel

Rating:
Summary: One of those hard to put down novels!
Review: Amazon.com have informed me that my review of Nashville 1865 has been swollowed into the land of computer nothingness. So impressed was I with the book that I'm posting the review a second time.

One sitters - they don't come around too often but when they do it's worth the wait. I read Nashville 1864 in one evening and wished I hadn't! This little novel - some 129 pages in length - contains so much in it's pages that it left me moved, sad, a little repulsed at the nature of war and death, but thankful I'd stumbled accross it while browsing Amazon.

I'd just finished Cloudsplitter by Russel Banks which at 758 pages is an intense and powerful read. Nashville was the ideal follow on - it's short, to the point, refreshing in it's simplicity and more importantly an entertaining, quality novel.

Jones is a wonderful storyteller, not a word out of place, not a wasted sentiment or action, this book involves you as a reader on a range of levels.

Often the Civil War is portrayed in a romantic light, thus reflecting how it was commonly percieved in the immediate aftermath of the shelling of Fort Sumter on April 12th 1861. Nashville is harrowing and disturbing rather than romantic, and here lies it's strength. The novel is honest and if that means leaving me as a reader slightly uneasy then it's done exactly what good writing attempts to do - to have an effect.

Some books after their reading will sit on my shelf gathering dust, I don't think that Nashville will be given enough time to gather dust at all.

Rating:
Summary: The Civil War from a Young Boy's Perspective
Review: At the outbreak of the Civil War, 12-year-old Steven Moore watches on as his father Jason saddles up his horse to join other Confederates in the fight to protect Tennessee. After many months of hardship, Steven's youngest sister, Liza, becomes so gravely ill that he decides to find his father and to bring him home. With his mother's approval and a crude map, he and his companion, a young slave named Dink, set off into the heart of the battle to find his father.

This is one of the most compelling novels of the Civil War, told from the perspective of a 12-year-old boy. Through his eyes, we see the area surrounding Nashville change from healthy farmland to desolate battle fields. The Confederate soldiers whom he knew to be proud and strong turn out to be haunted men with sallow faces, bare feet and rags for clothing. He and Dink watch some of the fighting firsthand: the booming of the canons, the black troops fighting for the Union, the dead and the dying everywhere. And, still he continues to search for his father, diving deeper and deeper into the heart of the battle.

With fantastically detailed imagery and strongly developed characters, Madison Jones has created a Civil War novel that appeals to all readers, both young and old. You have a real sense of what the war must have been like for a young boy, witnessing his family life upturned and almost destroyed. Nothing is romanticized. A strong novel for young adults and anyone interested in the Civil War.

Rating:
Summary: The Civil War from a Young Boy's Perspective
Review: At the outbreak of the Civil War, 12-year-old Steven Moore watches on as his father Jason saddles up his horse to join other Confederates in the fight to protect Tennessee. After many months of hardship, Steven's youngest sister, Liza, becomes so gravely ill that he decides to find his father and to bring him home. With his mother's approval and a crude map, he and his companion, a young slave named Dink, set off into the heart of the battle to find his father.

This is one of the most compelling novels of the Civil War, told from the perspective of a 12-year-old boy. Through his eyes, we see the area surrounding Nashville change from healthy farmland to desolate battle fields. The Confederate soldiers whom he knew to be proud and strong turn out to be haunted men with sallow faces, bare feet and rags for clothing. He and Dink watch some of the fighting firsthand: the booming of the canons, the black troops fighting for the Union, the dead and the dying everywhere. And, still he continues to search for his father, diving deeper and deeper into the heart of the battle.

With fantastically detailed imagery and strongly developed characters, Madison Jones has created a Civil War novel that appeals to all readers, both young and old. You have a real sense of what the war must have been like for a young boy, witnessing his family life upturned and almost destroyed. Nothing is romanticized. A strong novel for young adults and anyone interested in the Civil War.

Rating:
Summary: Compelling
Review: I wouldn't have known about this book without running across it while surfing amazon.com. It is a brilliant novel about the battle of Nashville told in powerful prose. It takes a little while to get used to Jones's style, as the sentences frequently run backwards, but by page 45 you know that you are reading a great book, and the style becomes lyrical and rhythmic. The defense of slavery may irritate you, but remember that this is FICTION told through the eyes of a SOUTHERNER who witnessed the war as a child. A+.

Rating:
Summary: Thank you amazon.com!
Review: I wouldn't have known about this book without running across it while surfing amazon.com. It is a brilliant novel about the battle of Nashville told in powerful prose. It takes a little while to get used to Jones's style, as the sentences frequently run backwards, but by page 45 you know that you are reading a great book, and the style becomes lyrical and rhythmic. The defense of slavery may irritate you, but remember that this is FICTION told through the eyes of a SOUTHERNER who witnessed the war as a child. A+.

Rating:
Summary: Southern Antebellum Sentiment
Review: Ignoring the overwhelming forces of modern revisionist Politically Correct thought, Jones has crafted a compelling, poignant tale of the passing of a people and their way of life. Framed against the final battle of the Western theatre of the American Civil War, Jones tells the tale of the defeat of Southern society through the eyes of a boy, searching the nightmare landscape of the apocalyptic battle of Nashville for his long absent father. With the defeat of the Confederate Army of Tennessee, under the ill-fated leadership of the horribly mis-guided John Bell Hood, the people of the South in turn become the objects of subjugation, suffering cruel penance for the sin of their "peculiar institution". Jones is to be commended for dealing with a difficult subject fairly, in terms of the context of the people who lived in that time in that place. The average ante-bellum Southerner was not evil, was not morally inferior, was not bent on inflicting evil on others, but was (a fact that Jones ignores) led down a path of destruction by an aristocratic cadre of self-serving politicians bent on greed and hungry for power. A thoughtful tale of another time and place in America's history, the dying of the light of the antebellum Southern society of common farm families - well worth telling and well told.

Rating:
Summary: They Have Beaten Us, Steven
Review: It is clear today that the Southern Confederacy is regarded as an evil aberration in American history. Many books and films depict the gray-coated Rebs as uncouth huns bent upon the destruction of a paternal and benevolent Union. Today, their symbols are reviled and their memory is denounced as if four states of the Confederacy weren't also Founding colonies themselves.

Nashville 1864 is told from the point of view of a 12 year-old boy, but the narrative is suitable for adults as well. Imagine an American city occupied by an enemy army. We have to reach all the way back to the Revolutionary War period for a practical analogy, but that period is so far behind us it is difficult create a connection within our 21st Century minds. The Civil war, however, is much closer to us. Young people may not be able to empathize, but people in their late-forties and older will probably remember a grandfather or great grandfather who lived during that time, so for us the Civil War is still real. Nashville was occupied by the Union Army, and the bitterness from that occupation still shows up from time to time.

Madison Jones' descriptions of the period and the emotion and the misery of war are vivid. When young Steven Moore's father tells him, "They have beat us, Steven", you can feel the agony and despair, and so throughout the book.

There are many great Civil War novels, but Nashville 1864 should not be overlooked.


Rating:
Summary: One of those hard to put down novels!
Review: Madison Jones is one of the unheralded masters of contemporary American fiction. He has written powerful, compelling stories dealing with such explosive issues as racism (in his masterpiece A CRY OF ABSENCE), drugs, family conflict, and sex (AN EXILE, turned into the Gregory Peck film I WALK THE LINE).

In the present volume Jones turns his attention to the waning days of the War Between the States, in which a young boy, with his black companion, goes searching for his father. This is not sugar-coated stuff. Jones casts an unflincing eye on the events, related in memoir form by the adult Steven, and the descriptions of war and its carnage are often graphic (but never exploitively so)in the manner, say, of Spielberg's SAVING PRIVATE RYAN. Jones never loses his moral focus, however. This is a story of love and courage, faithfulness and innocence, determination and loyalty.

A short work but memorable nonetheless, by a novelist long overdue greater and wider attention.

Rating:
Summary: One of those hard to put down novels!
Review: One sitters - they don't come around too often but when they do it's worth the wait. I read Nashville 1864 in one evening and wished I hadn't! This little (but I might add perfectly formed) novel - some 129 pages in length - contains so much in it's pages that it left me moved, sad, a little repulsed at the nature of war and death, but thankful I'd stumbled across it while browsing Amazon.

I'd just finished Cloudsplitter by Russel Banks which at 758 pages is an intense and powerful read. Nashville was the ideal follow on - it's short, to the point, refreshing in its simplicity and more importantly an entertaining, quality novel.

Jones is a wonderful storyteller, not a word out of place, not a wasted sentiment or action, this book involves you as a reader on a range of levels.

Often the Civil War is portrayed in a romantic light, thus reflecting how it was commonly perceived in the immediate aftermath of the shelling of Fort Sumter on April 12th 1861. Nashville is harrowing and disturbing rather than romantic and here lies it's strength. The novel is honest and if that means leaving me as a reader slightly uneasy then it's done exactly what good writing attempts to do - to make a difference.

Some books after their reading will sit on my shelf gathering dust, I don't think that Nashville will be given enough time to gather dust at all.