A massive novel, that requires strength and perseverance from the reader. Like those prisoners at Andersonville, only the strong will survive the depression of this novel. It's a admirable effort to deal with a difficult topic. Kantor's technique is to go into depth about dozens of characters. We learn about their ancestors, their childhood, their war experience in great detail, which has a lot to do with the size of this hefty tome. Focusing on only a few characters would have been sufficient for me, as a reader. The massive preponderance of "evidence" is overwhelming.
My greatest complaint is the total disregard by Kantor for proper punctuation. He is one of those arrogant authors that refuses to use quotation marks for dialog, and does not use commas to seperate strings of adjectives. Extremely disappointing, and it makes an already difficult novel more difficult to read. There is no excuse, in my humble opinion, for disregarding the rules and making it difficult for the reader.
This is the last of the Pulitzers that I ha decided to read. That's fifty-three that I have digested in one form or another. Please check my Pulitzer Reading project for the details.
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