" 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 Carolina's. 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 black and white refugees until all that remained was the dangerous transient life of the uprooted, the dispossessed, and the triumphant."
This is the story of those in this march. There is Pearl , the freed slave girl, Arly and Will the Confederate prisoners,the surgeon Colonel Wrede Sartorius, Sherman himself with Grant and Lincoln putting in an appearance at the end.
This is beautifully written like all of Doctorow's work, putting the reader among the awful awful violence that the two armies wrought on each other. The fighting was brutal, the injuries horrific.
There are not too many happy ending for those involved in this novel but its a very, very good read.
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