The March - E.L. Doctorow

I read this gripping novel immediately after finishing Doris Kearns Goodwin's "Team of Rivals," her biography of Abraham Lincoln. It was a fascinating addendum to the Lincoln story, and it was fun tying some of the events outlined in the Lincoln bio to Sherman's march through Georgia, South Carolina and North Carolina.

I've only dabbled in Doctorow's fiction since "Ragtime," but this will likely send me back to other works of his. The story of The March, of course, is historical, but the characters he creates are wonderful and full-bodied...complex, not one-dimensionally "good" or "bad."

The final scene in the book, presenting a representative (or symbolic?), personified sample of all the cultures that struggled together and with each other in the period, offers a hopeful conclusion to what could have been the dark, sometimes hopeless reality of 19th Century American history.