Books for Book Clubs A Good Place to Put a Disclaimer Before I get too far I have got to throw something out that has been eating at me since my biographies column a few months back. When I was first asked to do this column, I wanted to approach it as an alternative to a traditional LDS style book column. I typically go out of my way not to review LDS genre books. LDS people can and some will always only read LDS books, but I wanted to open up Meridian readers to other authors and great opportunities to grow and expand their world views through literature. No, not just “world” views, but views of people. I feel sometimes that maybe I am too tied to this old earth and the people here, but I am rather fascinated by us. We are all so unique, so many with wonderful stories given us by life, and talents given us by Father. I love to read these stories and share them with you. Sometimes, however, these stories aren’t pretty. They’re harsh and ugly, rough and difficult. Other times, they are beautiful and triumphant, completely inspirational. Sometimes, their lives are all of those adjectives and more. The characters, like real people, make good and bad choices, lust after what they shouldn’t, aren’t honest with themselves or others and struggle to be what they know they could or should. Some keep trying, knowing they are meant to be and do more, others revel in their Natural Man, and on and on. I love these people; I detest these people, and some I’d probably hate if I got to know them better. I just have to be willing to look beyond a few difficult issues before I make that decision. Stay with me. I’m getting to my point… I read quite a lot. Comparatively, I see very few movies. I used to see anything I wanted to, but that changed about a year before I got my endowment in 1997. It is sad, too, because I love movies. But as much as the graphic violence and sex gets to me, the language drives me nutty. Language is the stuff you just cannot shut your eyes to. That all being said, much of the time you cannot know what language lies await inside the pages of a book. You cannot know the context, the purpose, the extent, the characters using it, the author’s point in utilizing it, nor the pervasiveness of it. Is it G, PG, PG-13, R or Off-the-Charts? Unlike movies, I have found I can visually “skip” over words on a page, as no one is shouting them at me from a giant silver screen. But that may just be me. Everyone is different. Unlike some, a dozen or two words (depending on what they are) will not turn me away from a book. I do have my limits, however, and they are moderately low. In the words of American Idol’s Randy Jackson, “For me, for you, dog,” language may or may not turn me away from recommending a book to you. Sometimes I will put a particular book in the “Honorable Mentions” section just because of language instead of doing a full review. However, not always. There are several books I’m reviewing in this historical fiction genre that are going to have more language than I usually prefer to have in one of my recommends. Never fear, I will always give you a heads up on these things. The words on the page may take me aback, but if you choose to take my advice on a selection, I don’t want them to catch you off guard. I know some are just more sensitive than others. Do not send me nasty letters about what an awful Latter-day Saint I am. Thank you very much! Read at your own risk. Know your own limits. But also know there are some wonderful characters/ people out there with human flaws.. Revisiting the Civil War I just can’t get away from the South. I garnered a few great letters from last month’s column on Southern literature, including one from a brother from Georgia who reminded me of one good reason I am excited to be going home to Texas: BEEF barbeque. No more of this pulled pork/ vinegar sauce nonsense. Thank goodness!
I picked this book up months ago. I don’t even remember why I got it. I suppose the story sounded interesting enough. A woman’s plantation house near Nashvile is turned into a hospital for Confederate soldiers during a battle in November 1864, just months before the end of the Civil War. She buries fifteen hundred of them on her property. She fell in love with one of them at some point. Blah, blah, blah. Why not? Well, when I settled on historical fiction as my theme for the month, the Widow of the South finally got her turn. I am so glad I read this book. In style and content, it is right up my alley: Southern writer, Southern genre, historical, weakened characters finding more inner strength than they knew existed. Unfortunately, we take the good with the bad, and thousands of dead young men, a few scurrilous characters, and yes, even a great deal of PG-13-esque language comes along with this rewarding war story. The main character, Carrie Mc Gavock is a thirty year old widow. Though her husband is still living, she is in a permanent state of mourning for her three children who no longer are. Instead of living for the two that remain, Carrie has opted out of life. She wears black, holds up in the dark- away from the household, pondering her lost children’s lives; she misses them so. She loves her living ones, Hattie and Winder, but she just cannot bear to stop clinging to the dead. John, her husband, doesn’t know what to do for her but help preserve her solitude and hope she comes back to him some day. When the General Nathan Bedford Forrest (LOTS of stuff down is here named after him) shows up at Carrie’s door step to “requisition” her plantation as a field hospital for what is sure to be a slaughter of his troops, her slave and friend since childhood, Mariah, tries to tell him the mistress of the house can’t be bothered. She insists they simply cannot use the house because of Carrie’s delicate mental condition, but General Forrest doesn’t listen. In specific terms, he tells the women the battle will be starting shortly and the injured will be arriving sometime thereafter. Be prepared. Carrie is uncertain whether she and Mariah are up to being transformed into triage nurses, but she is roused to duty by her first charge: a child named Eli who had cracked his head on a rock. He is not a soldier, just a boy, merely an onlooker who had been brought to her house by his friend, but he needed her help. With the ghosts of her own children and her ineptitude at saving them hovering in her thoughts, it was dubious if she would even survive that moment, let alone the hours and days to come. It was only a sudden realization, as she stood seeing yet another child facing death, that she no longer feared God, that she loved Him. She finally understood that God was not the “author of children’s deaths” as she had come to believe because “…He did not even save His own Son. He had not taken His Son, He had lost him because of the sin of this world.” 1 And because Carrie could feel solidarity with God in that second, she found the strength to live again by serving Him, by serving the injured and dying that were at her door and the thousands more who would come pouring through her door by day’s end. What happened after Carrie’s epiphany was a gruesome, blur for the psyche, something most of us cannot even fathom, as Carrie and the household, including her young children tended to the soldiers that littered the plantation grounds. She laments having to expose Hattie and Winder to such travails, but acquiesces that it was an impossible task to keep them from it all. Such is war, I suppose. During the time of Carnton being used as a hospital, Carrie meets and subsequently falls in love with a young sergeant from Arkansas. Chaste though it was, you could call it a love borne out of stressful times, but it was more appropriate to call it “kismet.” Where she and John, were intellectual equals, Zachariah Cashwell was more her spiritual equal, and despite time and distance between them, he always was. At a certain time she held his life in her hands and forced him to live, and by doing so I think it helped keep her living, too. More central, however, to the story of The Widow of the South is the decision that Carrie made several years after the end of the Civil War to make sure that the young men that died in a field near her home would not have their graves desecrated by a hard-hearted local businessman (think: Mr. Potter from It’s a Wonderful Life). When it became clear that the calloused Mr. Baylor, who had lost his own son during the Battle of Franklin, intended to plow under the field that had been the main battle site and held the remains of roughly one thousand five hundred Southern soldiers, Carrie set forth to stop him. When she couldn’t stop him, she arranged to move them to her own property. Once she moved them, she recorded their names and burial places in her own Book of the Dead. Then, she commenced to mourn them, as was her way. But unlike with her children before the war arrived at her door step, it appears Carrie Mc Gavock still managed to live while holding vigil for those in the earth at Carnton. For many families, she was the only contact they had with their lost sons. And for many sons, she was the final means of contact they had with their families. In essence, she was the go-between between the living and the dead, and she took that job very seriously. She understood loneliness; she had felt the loneliness many of these men felt before dying after losing her angels, and she was compelled to make sure they were never left alone with no one to mourn their passing. She promised to always be there to remember their sacrifice them, and until December 16, 1922, she was. War Stories I know there are a good many in the world who do not appreciate war. I hear the songs on the radio, hear the commentary on the radio, and the rhetoric on the T.V. screen. As I look back over these past months since I started reading and writing, I realize I have recommended a fair number of war stories to you, or if not all out war, stories that deal with violent situations. Like my Disclaimer note above, I have to say, I do not revel in war, but realize that like the poor and needy, it will always be with us. I just don’t see it can or will ever be avoided until the Millennium, so I don’t waste a lot of time trying to get the world to sing Kumbaya. Ain’t gonna happen. Bummer, isn’t it? When people ask, as an appliance repair man recently did (yes, I can get into philosophical discussions with anyone, just give me an opening), why, if God is good, is there so much bad in the world? My pat no spin answer is “Because people suck!” We’re just stupid, isn’t that obvious? It’s not God’s fault; it’s ours.” My purpose always for diving into war stories is not to revel in the muck and horror of life, but to find the gems, the pearls in the mud. I know without a doubt as much filth as there is in this world and as ignorant as we humans are, the reality is there are always good people working with the Gifts of Heaven to make themselves better and helping those around them, just like Carrie Mc Gavock. I hope you agree. If you don’t, there is always fluff out there you can read, too, you just won’t see much of it in my columns. Next Month A Stolen Tongue 1. Robert Hicks, The Widow of the South, (Warner Books: New York, 2005) 107. I’d love to know what books you’re reading and whether or not you’ve enjoyed my recommendations. Please, add me to your friends’ list at GoodReads.com or contact me via email at [email protected] No Comments | Post or read comments FEATURES |
May 14, 2026
May 14, 2026
Anyway, one place I must visit before our Tennessee car tags go from green to red, white and lone starred again is the Carnton plantation in Franklin. About forty five minutes southwest of my house, it provides the setting for my most recent read this month, Robert Hicks’ Widow of the South. Sadly, it also provided the rear line for what is considered by many historians to be the bloodiest battle of the Civil War and the final resting ground for some fifteen hundred young Confederate soldiers.
