Gone with the Wind

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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: The ultimate Southen novel
Review: Our book club actually didn't pick this read for a while--and we specialize in Southern books! I suspect is was a little too obvious. But after taking on BIG FISH, Jackson McCrae's BARK OF THE DOGWOOD, and MIDNIGHT IN THE GARDEN OF GOOD AND EVIL, we started in on GWTW. All of us were a bit wary at first--all you have to do is look at the length--but it is actually an easy and fun read. Much, much more detailed than the movie, with additional characters and background, this book truly deserves its place at the top of a southern reading list.

Would also recommend: McCrae's BARK OF THE DOGWOOD, Berendt's MIGNIGHT IN THE GARDEN OF GOOD AND EVIL, and CRIMES OF THE HEART.

Rating:
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: Gone With the Wind's Racism
Review: First, let me say that Gone With the Wind is possibly the best and most satisfyingly well-written novel I have ever read. To quote Alice Randall, the author of another favorite of mine, The Wind Done Gone, "Above all, Gone With the Wind made me think."

Anyone who gives this book less than three stars invariably does so because of the rampant racism throughout the novel. One cannot say in defense that it was simply the views of the people at the time, because Magaret Mitchell, the author, was not just being historically accurate; she was racist herself.

The horror! A racist novel by a racist author! And what's worse, it's one of the best loved novels in America.

Parts of this book did make me cringe and leave me angry, namely the roles of Prissy and Big Sam. Yes, those parts were atrocious. But here's a thought:

Pretend for a minute that you were born in the early 1900's, in the deep South, with Confederate veterans and aging Southern belles for family. Now tell me you wouldn't be racist. Of course, any middle class enlightened white person would say they'd know better, but would you? I greatly doubt it. Gone With the Wind is fiction, not fact, from the mind of a woman who embodied what her family taught her, no more. Take it and move on. Sure, it's offensive, but it's also wonderful. There are too many layers to this novel for the complexity of it to be fully appreciated in my review, but if you're can't get past the racism to appreciate this book, then I have to wonder what else you're missing in life.

What I did when I finished Gone With the Wind was go out and buy Alice Randall's book The Wind Done Gone. It's very thought provoking, and it will mollify a bit of your anger dealing with the bad treatment of blacks in this book. Also, I reccomend The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison, because it deals with the internalized racism that slaves felt in the pre-war South. Beloved is another great one that will show you what the slaves REALLY went through. But don't miss out on Gone With the Wind. Read it, love it, and let it show you the past.

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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."

Rating:
Summary: An Unmatched Epic
Review: What words can I use to desribe the power and solidness that make this book!The moment I picked it up out of curiousity I was long gone in a majestic tale of sweet southern plantations,raw human emotion,and ruthless war that fill these pages with more than words,but a life all its own.Scarlett is an inspiring heroin,who isn't good nor just but is bursting with such a need to live that you get instantly swept away in her desires,impatience, contempt,love,and ultimately her thirst for anything and everything she can't have!I'm a just over half through with it and I'm frankly scared to finish it.What will I do with out Rhett,Melanie,Ashley,Mammy,Suellen,Carreen,Aunt Pittypat,Gerald,
Will,and all of them.Also the ones who have died from war or sickness as Ellen,Brent,Stuart,Charles,and the nameless faces that past on in a war that never should have been fought.This book has been an inspiration to me in all respects and I'll never forget a single word of it!P.S. The south should have won,we know that!

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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!

Rating:
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