The Judas Field: A Novel of the Civil War [Hardcover]

Howard Bahr (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: July 25, 2006

In this epic novel of violence and redemption by the author of The Black Flower, a Civil War veteran travels back over old battlefields toward a reckoning with the past

It's been twenty years since Cass Wakefield returned from the Civil War to his hometown in Mississippi, but he is still haunted by battlefield memories. Now, one afternoon in 1885, he is presented with a chance to literally retrace his steps from the past and face the truth behind the events that led to the loss of so many friends and comrades.

The opportunity arrives in the form of Cass's childhood friend Alison, a dying woman who urges Cass to accompany her on a trip to Franklin, Tennessee, to recover the bodies of her father and brother. As they make their way north over the battlefields, they are joined by two of Cass's former brothers-in-arms, and his memories reemerge with overwhelming vividness. Before long the group has assembled on the haunted ground of Franklin, where past and present--the legacy of the war and the narrow hope of redemption--will draw each of them toward a painful confrontation.

Moving between harrowing scenes of battle and the novel's present-day quest, Howard Bahr re-creates this era with devastating authority, proving himself once again to be the preeminent contemporary novelist of the Civil War.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

A middle-aged salesman in 1885 Mississippi, Cass Wakefield is a Civil War veteran of the Army of Tennessee, which saw action far from the leadership of Robert E. Lee, and ended, badly, at the battle of Franklin in 1864. Cass agrees to accompany a neighbor, 54-year-old terminally ill widow Alison Sansing, to Tennessee to recover the bodies of her father and brother, killed at Franklin. As they travel north, Cass's memories return with painful vividness, culminating as he walks over the scene of his army's disastrous defeat. Bahr (The Black Flower) moves back and forth between the tattered post-Reconstruction South and the war. He describes the effect of weapons on flesh in gruesome detail and brings to life a long-gone era with its strange smells, foods, fashions and principles. Though his uneducated characters often seem a little too articulate, their insights are excellent. Author of other well-regarded novels on the same period, Bahr treats the war as a natural disaster not unlike a hurricane. (Aug.)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From Booklist

In his third Civil War novel (after the highly praised The Black Flower, 1997, and Year of Jubilo, 2000), Bahr focuses not only on the carnage of battle but its horrible aftermath. Twenty years after the Battle of Franklin, Tennessee, in which more than 70 percent of the estimated 8,500-plus casualties were Confederate, Alison Sansing of Cumberland, Mississippi, who's dying of cancer, asks her friend Cass Wakefield, a survivor of the conflict, to help her bring home the remains of her father and brother, who died there. Although reluctant to return to Franklin, Cass refuses the help of fellow veterans--Roger Lewellyn, his "pard," and Lucian Wakefield, a 13-year-old orphan conscript--but both show up at the battlefield, where an encounter with a crazed old man leads to tragedy. Bahr masterfully portrays ordinary men called to war whose belief in courage, honor, pride, and comrades sustains them but leaves them empty but for their terrible memories and grief. A beautifully written portrayal of the price that war exacts. Michele Leber
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 304 pages
• Publisher: Henry Holt and Co.; 1st edition (July 25, 2006)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0805067396
• ISBN-13: 978-0805067392
• Product Dimensions: 9.4 x 6.4 x 1.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.7 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (35 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #767,105 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

14 of 14 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The Civil War was more than just battles., October 5, 2006

By 

Robert C. Olson (Vacaville, California USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: The Judas Field: A Novel of the Civil War (Hardcover)

Magnificent! Mr. Bahr has written a wonderful, poignant, personal view of how the brutality of the Civil War affected those that lived it. War is the ultimate of human endeavors; those who have been embraced by it are changed forever. Brutality on a grand scale that brings into question the essence of the human condition. Mr. Bahr reaches into the very soul of those who have witnessed the carnage and examines how their lives are changed forever. His character development was superb. His use of the pervasive darkness of that era was stunning in its portrayal. Men fought and died not for their nation but for their beliefs in their fellow comrades. Mr. Bahr is a genius at putting into words the timeless love of men and women who lived those desperate hours. War is terrible but man's belief in himself and those who he fights beside transcends the violence of the battlefield.
I highly recommend this classic novel for anyone who wants to briefly glimpse what it is like to taste, hear, smell, and feel the horrors of the battlefield. No gratuitous violence, although the graphic nature of battle is portrayed in all its ugliness. Mr. Bahr's trilogy of the civil war is the best I have ever read on how those that lived it, dealt with its horrors. He is a master at showing how the glories of the battlefield scared an entire generation for years after the guns went silent. A must read.

14 of 15 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The Written War, October 23, 2006

By 

Kenneth W. Noe (Auburn, AL United States) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: The Judas Field: A Novel of the Civil War (Hardcover)

Daniel Aaron, in The Unwritten War, lamented that the Civil War never produced a great work of fiction until, possibly, William Faulkner's works. If anyone ever updates that book, the author may come to a happier conclusion with the works of Howard Bahr. Lost in the clamor over Charles Frazier's Cold Mountain, Bahr's novel of the Battle of Franklin, The Black Flower--published the same year as Frazier's fine book--was a taut, beautiful tale that I have recommended to readers for years as the best Civil War novel I know. The excellent follow-up book, The Year of Jubilo, carried the story of Yalobusha County's Confederate sons forward to Reconstruction. Now comes The Judas Field, proving that Bahr is not just our greatest Civil War novelist, but one of our greatest modern novelists, period. Others describe the particulars of the story below, so there is no need for me to do that here. Suffice it to say that with this book, Bahr's fictional world, stretching from Mississippi to the cotton gin at Franklin, is beginning to resemble Faulkner's Yoknapatawpha. This body of work deserves ten stars.

8 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Marvelously written!, August 3, 2006

By 

Lamar W. Nesbit - See all my reviews
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This review is from: The Judas Field: A Novel of the Civil War (Hardcover)

Not a necessarily a civil war buff, I had to be encouraged to read this book on its literary merit versus content. As a result,an absolutely beautifully written novel was discovered. The horrors and atrocities of the Civil War are well done but not necessarily for shock value. Bahr's character development and ability to portray the postwar southern landscape are superb. The last 100 pages have to be one of the best pieces of southern fiction - or any fiction - written in recent years.
Lamar Nesbit, Jackson, MS