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The March

by E.L. Doctorow

September 2006

Synopsis

The March"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. The author of Ragtime, City of God, and The Book of Daniel has given us a work with an enormous cast of characters - white and black; men, women, and children; unionists and rebels; generals and privates; freed slaves and slave owners. At the center are 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."

(Publisher)

Winner of the 2005 National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction

Reviews

  • "The March conjures up the War of Secession -- also known as the War Between the States and the War of Northern Aggression -- as vividly as any contemporary account I've read, and more plausibly than most. Devotees of our nation's darkest hour, as well as that subset of Confederacy buffs willing to entertain the possibility that all may not have been roses in the antebellum South, will find a great deal to admire in its pages." (The Washington Post)

  • "It is Mr. Doctorow's achievement in these pages that in recounting Sherman's march, he manages to weld the personal and the mythic into a thrilling and poignant story. He not only conveys the consequences of that campaign for soldiers and civilians in harrowingly intimate detail, but also creates an Iliad-like portrait of war as a primeval human affliction - 'not war as adventure, nor war for a solemn cause,' but 'war at its purest, a mindless mass rage severed from any cause, ideal, or moral principle,' a "characterless entanglement of brainless forces" as God's answer 'to the human presumption.'" (New York Times, Michiko Kakutani)

Book Club Rating and Comments

If you or your book club has read this book and would like to share your comments, please email us at upthecreekbc@yahoo.com.

Other Books by E.L. Doctorow

  • Billy Bathgate
  • The Book of Daniel
  • City of God
  • Ragtime
  • Sweet Land Stories
  • Welcome to Hard Times
  • World's Fair