Volume 44, Number 18 · November 20, 1997
The Long Voyage Home
By Alfred Kazin
Cold Mountain
by Charles Frazier
Atlantic Monthly Press, 356 pp., $24.00
Inman, a Confederate soldier beset by flies drinking at the neck wound he sustained in the Petersburg campaign (1864), is in a hospital ward. He is desperate to get out of the war and back to his mountain home in western North Carolina. Aman born blind asks Inman to describe his battle experiences. Inman wishes that he had been blind enough to miss the horrors he had seen at Malvern Hill, Sharpsburg, Petersburg. He dwells particularly on the battle of Fredericksburg (1862), the one-sided slaughter of so many thousands in the Union army under the hapless General Burnside. (The senseless carnage there depressed the North, and Lincoln said in despair, 'If there is a worse place than Hell I am in it.') Inman recalls a Confederate walking among the Union wounded with a hammer, finishing each one off with a blow to the head. He wanted their boots.
Review, 1901 words
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