The Hornet's Nest: A Novel of the Revolutionary War

Rating:
Summary: Good, but not great.
Review: President Carter deserves credit for doing a novel about the southern theater of war during the American Revolution. It is time and past time that we delve into that region during this period, which is generally ignored or glossed over in our schools.

The characters in this book aren't developed terribly well, and the writing seems labored at points, but since this is Carter's first novel he can be forgiven for that.

I enjoyed it, and although I only gave it three stars I would recommend this novel... especially to anyone who has an interest in that particular part of our national history.

Rating:
Summary: Fighters and Farmers
Review: I will be brutally honest right from the start. Carter is not a great novelist. But I do not regret for a moment having taken the time to read his historically accurate tale of backcountry farmers and militia men at the dawn of our nation.

Chapter after chapter, I was exposed to new perspectives on our revolutionary heritage. Each main character tells a unique tale, and yields interesting new ideas. For example, at one point the main character reflects on his new life as a soldier and finds that risking his life in battle is at once easier and more rewarding than the unending labor of farm work.

Yes, at times the story reads like a history textbook, but that really is the value of this book. The history is rich and alive and the reader can quite easily picture the narrow trails and tiny farms of 18th-century Georgia. But the characters are what keeps the story moving, and some are fairly complex and well developed. There is drama, tragedy, humor, and even sexual tension.

As a life-long resident of the Pacific Northwest, I don't have any personal connection to the South, or its geography and history. Yet I still found this novel very compelling and rich. To a resident of Georgia, the Carolinas, or Florida, this novel will resonate much more deeply with your own life and experience. It's not exceptionally well written, but it is more than good enough. And it is a little bit of history in itself, the first novel written by a US President.

Rating:
Summary: A Worthy First Novel!
Review: President Jimmy Carter's The Hornet's Nest is an exciting first novel. Carter introduces his reader to the Revolutionary War in the South, a subject rarely broached in most American History classes and texts, and tells the story of Ethan Pratt, a Philadelphian who sets out for the south to build a life.

Ethan Pratt is the novel's focal character, although the reader often loses sight of him among the other historical characters. The early events which culminate in the execution of Ethan's brother Henry in North Carolina seem oddly similar to Carter's autobiographical tale of governmental corruption in his earlier book Turning Point. Pratt moves from being a loyal British colonist to a concerned citizen opposed to colonial corruption to a militia member ready to execute British prisoners of war in an act of revenge.

The historical background is one which seldom has been told. Although the Battle of Kings Mountain is often noted in history texts, the fact that the Revolution in the South was largely fought American colonist against American colonist is rarely mentioned. Execution of prisoners, rape and pillage and murder, terrorist actions are all part of the scene in this novel.

Carter tells the story well and introduces lots of new material. The cast of characters reads like a list of counties in Georgia and South Carolina--probably because the counties are named for these individuals.

Now, the complaint . . . the work needed a better editor. So many individuals are introduced that it is often difficult to keep track of the action. Occasional errors enter into the text, for example, on page 437 General Andrew Pickens mysteriously morphs into Pickett (the Civil War General?) at the bottom of the page and then changes back to Pickens. This is a minor error, but there is so much action and so many characters that small errors can quickly cause confusion. Ethan Pratt is often left out of lengthy sections of the story, leaving the reader wondering where Pratt has gone. Finally, there are times when Carter uses a page to traverse several years of action and other times when a similar amount of space is used to describe Ethan's construction of a chair--a case of too little detail, followed by too much detail.

Still, this is an admirable work for Carter. Should he choose to write another novel, I'll read what he writes and I am certain I'll find something there worth my time!

Rating:
Summary: Absolutely worthwhile
Review: Okay, I'll admit this is not the greatest novel I have ever read. I agree that it's not likely to win any prizes for literature. Nevertheless, it passed the three most important tests of a good read:

1) I learned a lot reading it;
2) I could not put it down but was disappointed to finish it;
3) It was three-dimensional, meaning that I felt like I was a part of the action, not watching it on a TV screen.

This very good book helps fill a very large void in our understanding of the Revolutionary War in the South. More important, it sensitively explores the ambiguities of war, loyalty, and patriotism.

Rating:
Summary: The Revolutionary Rebels Won the South
Review: President Carter has brought to life the story of The American Revolutionary War with great detail and exciting verbage. I knew nothing at all about the South and it's participation in the war and his book has wet my interest to learn more. The next book I read will be Savannah to Yorktown by Henry Lumpkin. Unfortunately the editor could have made the book better if he actually read from beginning to end.It lost momentum with to much detail about a vist to a cabin between action scenes near the end.And both women in Eathans life lived "Northward". I think Mavis won him,and he should have said so more clearly.

Rating:
Summary: A somewhat biased account...
Review: I also wanted very much to enjoy this book as I have always been an avid student of the history and demographics of the South of that era with several of my ancestral family lines being participants in the events depicted. Frankly, there is not enough general knowledge of the important role the South played in the winning of our indipendence, and I applaud Mr. Carter's attempt to rectify that.
Aside from that, however, I was generally disappointed with the work. I'm sure the author believed himself to be more than fair to both sides. Yet, I could not help but notice a inherent bias in the work that I had to work to understand. It occured to me that the loyalists received altogether more sympathetic treatement than did most of the patriots.
At Carter's hand, the loyalists, as personified by Thomas Brown, are generally refined, introspective individuals, driven to their violence by circumstances. Patriots, such as Elijah Clarke, appear to have simply been born violent, uncouth and predudice. The message appears to be that the rugged individualism that marked the infancy of our culture can only be trusted to the occassional special indiviual such as Ethan Pratt, or Jimmy Carter. The rest of us need guidance, we need government. And perhaps it is not an altogether good thing that we lost so early the guiding hand of the British government. Maybe if the regulator movement would have succeeded the Revolution would have not been necessary, and we could have had a few more generations of guidance under the crown of England to become more comforatble with dependency upon government and less dependent upon ourselves.

Rating:
Summary: Should've wrote a nonfiction book
Review: To start off, I dont read a lot of fiction, and I wouldn't have gone out of my way to read Jimmy Carter's fiction work on the Revolutionary War, but my dad got if for me at Christmas.

To start off, Carter is as good fiction writer as he was President, some will say he's great others not. Of course, I've been trying to write a novel for a few months and it is mighty tough.

I think what makes this book rate a little below average is the fact that Carter goes into detail about certain battles to be, then he jumps ahead to after the battle. So you have all this tenttensionnting then you miss the climax. Then he uses one charcharacter'ster's to the King as a way of keeping the reader up to day of the RW (is that the avreabreveationthe Revolutionary War?). Using this may help the reader but I found it distracting that a servant of the governor of Georgia would take time to inform the king of events in New England.

Additiadditionally of the book reads like a text book, I've read fiction books that read like nonfiction, but not like text books. i.e. "After the battle Brown's men had lost 145 of their stregnstreagnthis second in command died two days later of a shraplshrapnale groin." I made that up but it is close to what there is in there.

Not many books are written about the South during the RW, but if Carter would have written a straight nonfiction book, I believe it would have been far my interesting.

Rating:
Summary: Excellent Historical Perspective
Review: As a genealogist with ancestors who were in Georgia and the Carolinas before and during the Revolutionary War, I was interested to see what perspective Jimmy Carter would bring to the topic. I found this to be an excellent historical perspective that personalized the events of the day and made me understand why people, whether settlers, Indians, or slaves, made the choices they did. While I have read some "history" books and articles, they tend to be more abstract. This book gave me understanding of the people and their motivations in relation to the war and the times. If I had wanted to read a love story, I would not have chosen a book by Jimmy Carter. (Perhaps Nora Ephron or even Nora Roberts!)

However, this book gave a thorough accounting of the political events, the battles, and the kinds of people involved at each stage. Some incidents, like that of the slave Quash Dolly, were individual stories that stood alone--except that it showed why some--and perhaps many slaves--chose to support the British rather than the American revolutionaries. The treatment of the Indians, and the lengthy development of the personality and activities of the British Indian agent and spy, Thomas Brown, showed why the Indians threw their lot in with the British. Personalities of many of the Georgia and Carolina revolutionary leaders were drawn out effectively (example, Elijah Clarke) as well as many other wartime leaders.

Hornet's Nest is a great read if you are interested in history of the beginning of this country from a perspective that is different from that of the usual "founding fathers" approach. It also portends many of the problems that we faced years later with the political issues leading to and following the Civil War and later settlements farther west.

I have already started going to other reference books and pure "histories" to find out more about some of the people and the events described in this book. That kind of inspiration signals a good book to me.

Rating:
Summary: History does NOT come alive, unfortunately
Review: I wanted to like "The Hornet's Nest". I'm becoming more and more of a history (and, by extension, historical fiction) buff these days, and when my brother lent me this book I accepted it eagerly. However, his initial reservations ("It's badly written; I can't get into it") were absolutely on the money.

Sad but true--the book is a failure. Though his subject matter is interesting (the Revolutionary War as it was fought and experienced in the South) and his research is thorough and admirable, Jimmy Carter is simply unable to bring it all alive in novelistic form. Style is required in the writing of a novel, and Mr. Carter doesn't have it. Page after page of thudding exposition and flat dialogue from stiff characters cripple the story's momentum to the point of exasperation. Though I learned from the book, I didn't enjoy it -- of course your mileage may vary, but proceed with caution.

Rating:
Summary: I thought I was reading a James F. Cooper novel
Review: I've read the other reviews and find the novel left me with a different feeling than most. J.F. Cooper did the public a service by telling tales of Natty "Hawkeye" Bumpo and his two indian friends. We vivedly learned about the dangers of life in rural America at a time when European authors were the rage. Jimmy Carter is not J.F. Cooper, but he accomplishes the same thing. He takes a part of our war for independence that isn't in the forefront and explains it to us in a relational way that is easy to understand. I learned something of husband/wife relationships in the rural south, how neighbors interacted, farming and how to build a log cabin. This book opened my eyes to the plight of early Americans and their struggle to do what was right. I recommend this book. The research was great!