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Summary: Entertainment with Racist Sentimentality
Review: GWTW is undoubtedly an american classic for more reasons than one - sweeping storyline, strong characters and just the flow of simple lucid narrative prose that keeps you going from page to page with sustained interest (not an easy job if it is 700 pages!). I read it a few times when i was young, just fell in love with the movie and it is part of my library collection as well. I still enjoy the color and splendor and perky dialogue although the book is too long to read again with other reasons too.As i grew i figured out what was missing underneath the sentiments we have for it. There is not one word against racism or intolerance or suffering undergone by others during those times. Yes the south lost it all but times and lives change, some cruelly others more slowly with time - it is a natural order of things to change and intolerant lifestyles definitely have to. Lot of people have a longing for good times gone, but it needs to be laced with feelings for what caused it to happen and does not automatically mean bad times have come. I would think hidden beneath the huge popularity of the book so many years after it was made is partly love for simpler times but a lot of guilt for simplistic and intolerant ways of the past that were hidden by economic prosperity and picture postcard lifestyles.
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Summary: Great book, but I will not be reading it again
Review: Yes, it is a magnificent novel, an American classic. Filled with larger than life characters Gone with the Wind takes the reader to a chapter of American history not readily remembered (Southern Reconstruction) and to institutions we wish we could not remember (slavery, racism and the KKK). Lets talk about the novel. It is not a book for the faint of heart- my edition is over 700 pages. Yet, Margaret Mitchell has the gift to immerse you in a world that has long since passed. From the comfort of our armchairs it is difficult for us to imagine the sense of lostness the southern gentry must of felt during and after the war. They simply lost everything. Yet, there is something about the American character that does not want to give up, a stubbornness best personified by Scarlet O'Hara. I first read Gone with The Wind in the early 90's, it left an indelible imprint on my mind. About a year ago as I was persuing my library, it caught my eye again. I pull it for the self, sat down in my wing back chair and began reading eagerly anticipating being drawn into Mitchell's south once again. This time, however, I could not finish the book. A few hundred pages into it, I gently closed the cover and put it back into my library. What was it that caused me not complete this book? It was the blatant racism that seemed to permeate every other page. Yes, I realize that this book was written by a southerner reflecting a time and culture long since gone. Yes, racism is an appropriate subject to write about. Yes, one may write a novel that reflect the racism of the antebellum south- but this is one country preacher who will not read it again.
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Summary: best line
Review: The book and movie will always be remembered for the classic line: "We'll always have Paris".
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Summary: I loved this book!!
Review: Gone with the wind is the best book i have ever read!! It was so awesome!! Its my favorite book ever!!
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Summary: Most Awesome book EVER
Review: When I first started reading this book, I was like, "ok, great, another borefest..." but Gone With the Wind soon became one of my favorite books of all times! Scarlett and Rhett were some of the best characters I had ever encountered. A 5 star timeless classic!
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Summary: The "Lord of the rings" of romance
Review: It has been said that all fantasy books are "Lord of the rings" progenies. If true, then all romance books have "Gone with the wind" roots. Every hero worth fantasizing about has Rhett's dash and every heroine seems to have Scarlett's spunk. I first read this book after years of loving the romance genre. It was already some 5 decades written and the author was long gone but I remember thinking: "Wow, so this was how it all started."
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Summary: Still the most readable long novel ever written!
Review: It took this reviewer half a century to get around to reading this great novel for the first time! Appreciating it then, with 'fresh eyes' I share the view that "Gone With The Wind" is quite simply the most readable long novel of all time. With world-wide sales nudging 25 million, it's probably fair to say that most first-time readers (apart from the odd reviewer here at the world's biggest web site) have shared that opinion in the almost 70 years since Margaret Mitchell wrote her one-and-only book. At least one other, highly readable novelist of the past century, the late James A. Michener certainly felt that way. I'm recalling an interview of thirty years ago in which Michener - a master storyteller in his own right - expressed awe at Mitchell's achievement. I remember Michener quoted a long-forgotten critic who greeted the book's release in 1936 with the perfect, one-sentence summing up: "It's the shortest long novel I have ever read!" Michener predicted at that time (1975) that "critics will forever have to grapple with the problem of why Margaret Mitchell's novel has remained so readable, and so important to so many people." Michener singled out a few of the "super-dramatic confrontations" so perfectly conjured up in Mitchell's lucid, timeless writing style: Mammy lacing Scarlett into her corset; the wounded at the railway station; Scarlett shooting the Union straggler; the girls making Scarlett a dress from the moss-green velvet draperies; Rhett carrying his wife upstairs to the long-unused bedroom. Yet for all of its amazing drama, the novel does not ultimately depend upon major confrontations for its page-turning momentum: Michener I remember, zeroed in on two 'central' paragraphs which provide the reader with perfect glimpses into the way the two major characters have 'grown' before our eyes within these pages. One of these paragraphs captivates our imagination in about the middle of the book (chapter 29): "Somewhere, on the long road that wound through those four years, the girl with her sachet and dancing slippers, had slipped away, and there was left a woman with sharp green eyes, who counted pennies and turned her hands to many menial tasks, a woman to whom nothing was left from the wreckage, except the indestructible red earth on which she stood." And, in the final pages, that indelible portrait or Rhett, age forty-five: "He was sunken in his chair, his suit wrinkling untidily against his thickening waist, every line of him proclaiming the ruin of a fine body and the coarsening of a strong face. Drink and dissipation had done their work on the coin-clean profile, and now it was no longer the head of a young pagan prince on newly minted gold, but a decadent, tired Caesar on copper debased by long usage." It's true to say (again as Michener noted thirty years ago) that the weakness of "Gone With The Wind" is the almost exclusive focus on Atlanta, ignoring the rest of the South: When in fact, it was really the ENTIRE South that changed, altered by war, and defeat, and social upheaval - and stark determination to re-establish iteself." Michener astutely observed that GWTW "depicts with remarkable felicity, the spiritual history of a region." Most everyone these days would concede that Margaret Mitchell's personal views on the "liberation of the former slaves" (as expressed in subsequent interviews) were less than compassionate. Nevertheless, it was NOT Mitchell who composed those words which make some of us wince when they're scrolling up the screen in the movie version - words quaintly poetic perhaps, but manifestly insulting to those Americans whose ancestors never mistook the days of slavery as part of some "pretty world" poignantly longed-for, or in some way better than America today. (This reviewer has a pretty good memory for well-cadenced English prose, and this is his memory of those opening words from some anonymous male screenwriter.) "There was a land of cavaliers and cotton fields called the 'Old South.' Here, in this pretty world, gallantry took its last bow. Here was the last ever to be seen of knights and their ladies fair, of master and slave. Look for it only in books, for it is no more than a dream remembered, a civilization gone with the wind." So much better are the novelist's own words, distilled into so many sentences and paragraphs that positively 'sing' in our memory. Like this one: "He swung her off her feet into his arms and started up the stairs. Her head was crushed against his chest and she heard the hard hammering of his heart beneath her ears. He hurt her and she cried out, muffled, frightened. Up the stairs, he went in the utter darkness, up, up, and she was wild with fear." Or this: "Hunger gnawed at her empty stomach again, and she said aloud: "As God is my witness, as God is my witness, the Yankees aren't going to lick me. I'm going to live through this, and when it's over, I'm never going to be hungry again. No, nor any of my folks. If I have to steal or kill - as God is my witness, I'm never going to be hungry again." ----- I have often thought that "age twenty-six" is the single most important year of any long and healthy lifetime (for too many subjective reasons to list here; but think of the athletes or musicians we've admired when they were at the very summit of their game -- in their twenty-sixth year). So it comes as no surprise to learn that Margaret Mitchell was at that same magic age when she began work on this --- the book another great novelist of the last century would term "this long and powerful recollection of her home town - destined to become a titanic tale of human passions, loved around the world" . . . (its astonishing impact) "a mystery then, and remains one now."
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Summary: The Best Book I've Ever Read
Review: I just finished this book yesterday, and I can't stop thinking about it. Seriously an amazing story. The writing, the characters, the details, and the historical context were all perfect! I LOVED this book. Everyone should read it!
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Summary: A diamond in the rough
Review: I read this book once. Once was enough, but twice would be better. I'm an avid reader, and writer. This book captured every emotion that literary devices are suppose to capture. I found myself crying, laughing, scared, shocked. I've been searching for a book that competes with Gone With the Wind and haven't found one. You know the main characters like they are in your life, and you're taken back to the Civil War. Nothing is downcasted, everything is how it was in the eighteen sixies. Scarlett O'Hara was such a wonderful character, she lives in everyone hearts long after the last page is turned. Even though the book is lengthy, it keeps your attention, truely, until the last page and would keep it further if it were longer. The book was amazing, a true American Literature Classic. I highly recommend this book. You won't be able to find another like it. Gone With the Wind is a true, diamon in the rough.
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Summary: My Southern reading list
Review: GWTW is, and will always be, at the top of anyone's list for Southern books. But there are others which should NOT be forgotten. My list: Gone With the Wind
Bark of the Dogwood
Fried Green Tomatoes
Confederacy of Dunces
The Heart is a Lonely Hunter
Other Voices, Other Rooms
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