The March
E. L. Doctorow"E.L. Doctorow's teeming fictional account of the army's progress through Georgia and the Carolinas, razing cities and plantations and sweeping up in its wake a mongrel procession of freed slaves and white refugees, is an extraordinary achievement, bringing together historical and invented characters and reviving with abundant color and energy an episode of American history whose consequences still reverberate in contemporary race relations. In the hands of a less skilled writer, such moral echoes might easily have been overplayed, but Doctorow treads with care and subtlety around the subject of slave-holding and introduces no anachronism; his characters' thoughts on freedom, predestination and race are consistently of their time and the reader is left to draw whatever inferences he or she may." - Stephanie Merritt, The Guardian