Customer Reviews

Ride With the Devil

5 star:		(16)
4 star:		(11)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

Finally and at last, the border war of Missouri/Kansas is having its story told. Here were no magnificent lines of battle with brave banners and an awe-struck foe admiring the fatal advance. Here were no bugle calls, no gold braid uniforms or gentleman officers in plumed hats. This was a dirty, vicious, strange-dogs-in-a-meathouse fight that shattered families, emptied neighborhoods, and sometimes created feuds that lasted generations after the war.

Daniel Woodrell writes with a remarkable style perfectly suited to the tale he tells. Taut, sparse, haunting, lyrical yet terrible, easing us lazily along from moments of unpretentious poetry to drop us jangling into stark, slamming violence. From the first page, I read it as drinking a rare liquor, sipping and savoring only a few pages a day, in no hurry to have it end.

Mr. Woodrell does not rub our faces in gore, but nor does he shrink from or glorify the brutality of killing. We have no doubt of what is happening, recoil from its horror, yet the image is drawn with such spare, severe strokes that we are left stunned as the aftermath of a car wreck - what just happened? When one character dies, the scene is engraved with a laser beam; "Oh, sweet Lord Jesus. It was way down there past terrible....My world bled to death."

Yet rather than being a story about a war and its battles, this a story about very young men - and women - whose lives are turned inside-out by that war. We see them involved in the very human struggle for place, for a sense of belonging, for those fleeting moments of gentleness, set against the smouldering, bloody backdrop of war, and jerked back to the bad-chili burning in the guts for payback when "comrades" are lost.

Rather than merely a war story, it is in part a love story, love of friend for friend, a man for a woman. There is no drippy sentimentality, no saccharine examinations of emotion. The same pen that strokes murder in sharp black lines etches with exquisite delicacy the gentler moments.

The reader may initially find the Victorian dialogue a bit awkard, but in only moments, there seems no other way the story could have been told. Nor do I feel that any other writer could have told this tale so well, save this native son of the Ozark country.

Told through the eyes of young Jake Roedel, who accepts what he sees with no idealism and only later any question, I recommend this book with a whole heart. Most especially I recommend it to those with an interest in the Missouri/Kansas conflict, or any part of the less-defined, personal aspects of the Civil War. For story, characterizations, marvelous use of language, and a haunting quality that lingers long after the last page is turned, I give it a solid five stars.

I read this book just after finishing the much acclaimed "Cold Mountain." Amazon.com has certianly missed the boat in not linking the two books. As a history buff, and avid reader I found that "Woe to Live On" has "Cold Mountain" beat for getting the feel of the time and believable characters. It also told the story in an appropriate amount of pages (unlike "Cold Mountain").

I live in Missouri and have traveled through the South and North -- I have noted that in the South there are allot of monuments to the Confedracy, in the north there are allot of monuments to the Grand Army of the Republic. This book demonstrates why Northwest MO doesn't have any monuments to the Civil War. We have a few markers for battles, but no monuments to either side -- it was just too painful a topic with neighbors on opposing sides. I hope the movie does the book justice. (Why aren't they re-releasing the book with the actors on the cover a la Sense and Sensibility?)

The influence of both Twain and Cormac McCarthy are fairly clear to see in Daniel Woodrell's Ride with Devil. The sheer carnage reminds one of McCarthy's Outer Dark and Blood Meridian. But there's more. Ride With the Devil is also a coming of age novel telling the story of Jake Roedel, a young Bushwhacker (and immigrant's son), who has not known a woman, but who has killed 15 men.

In Woodrell's hands, Jake is a complex mix of child and killer. He has been hardened by a war that, in the contested border areas of Missouri & Kansas, was as murderous as modern day Bosnia. Robbery, murder, torture, in an eye for an eye conflict, was the coin of the day. Nevertheless, the reader senses the human Jake trying to peek out from beyond the callus. Sometimes it's a moment of tragically misplaced pity for a northern militia acquaintance, or his growing interest about the woman, the widow Sue Lee, of his "near" brother Jack Bull. And then there's growing friendship with Holt, a freed slave who has been riding with the bushwhackers. A common ground gradually develops between the despised immigrant's son, and the mistrusted black man, as they see the south fall apart due to invasion. Interestingly, Woodrell is able to show both characters growing dissatisfaction for the southern cause, as its increasingly being fought (the raid on Lawrence being a point of true descent), while at the same time retaining their hate for northerners who seek to impose, through invasion, new rules for the old. A subtle truth that historians still can't seem to get right, but which acquires an awful plausibility in the half-boy, half-man voice of Roedel. This is fine novel that should be probably be viewed beyond the genre of a western and/or historical fiction. Certainly, the romance of the novel, is of a truer nature, given it is a time of war, than that of the prize winning Cold Mountain. Ride With the Devil can sit quite comfortably beside that Frazier's fine novel. It has it's own grim, but ultimately hopeful truths, to pass on.

"Cry havoc, and let slip the dogs of war!" 16 year old Jake and his friends may not be able to quote the bard, but these teenage hardcases know too much about havoc. You can get a dollars worth of bitterness for only a nickel hereabouts. The war in Kansas and Missouri that raged for years before and after the 'War of North Aggression' left a lot of scars on this edge of the prairie. There weren't a lot of major battles, nothing you had to learn about in school. Just a neverending campaign of mutual retaliation. Casual hangings, work-a-day shooting sprees, ordinary assassinations, mundane decapitations. Even a not-so-ordinary arson where the yankee's burned a warehouse full of captured Southern women in Kansas City. Oops! You know, your ordinary border war. Ho-hum stuff. Payback for payback, ad nauseum. 20 years of Guerilla warfare waged mainly by teenage boys in cowboy hats. Make 'em wear ballcaps backwards while chanting YO and flashing gang signs, and it could be your town, today. In case you didn't think a border war between a couple of bland midwestern states had any relevance to your life...wise up, pilgrim. Read Woe to Live On, you might spot some of those mistakes History professors were always warning you to learn from, or be doomed to repeat. You know, like "Lather, rinse, repeat." This is good stuff, Woodrell is a master at dialect, and his grasp of the underlying hopelessness of this conflict rings true. I advise you to read it before the movie gets here. Get it the way Woodrell meant it, before some scriptwriter tries to make you believe this mess was all about slavery. Yeah, slavery drew a line in the sand between "Freestate" Kansas and "Secesh" Missouri. But how 'bout those poor neutral immigrant rascals standing on the wrong side of that silly line when a batch of masked riders rides up? Not everyone had a dog in the fight, but guess what? Once the payback starts, there isn't a lot of time for sorting out believers from nonbelievers. Ho Hum. Tie him to that wagonwheel, set the wagon on fire, lets ride into town, I hear they got a real purty gal working at the dry goods store. That attitude makes for a real unhealthy environment, maybe this is the sort of thing your professor wanted you to clue in on. This war out here wasn't about noble causes. There weren't many thin grey clad lines valiently crashing into blue clad hordes. We just had a lot of victims, lots of 'em hanging til they turned icky green. Blue and Grey means less than live or dead. I got one request. Next time this country decides to settle a noble cause by choosing straws and flailing away at itself...y'all go do it somewhere else. This border is closed for repairs.

Woodrell is an excellent writer, and with this book he takes on the guerrilla "border war" that existed between Kansas and Missouri for almost ten years before it spilled over into the Civil War. Like "Gone to Texas", a book about the same topic which was made into the movie "The Outlaw Josey Wales", Woodrell chronicles a band of Missouri guerrillas who are being chased by the Union Army. Yet this is less a story of the civil war than it is of a stone cold killer who begins to tire of the carnage and of the knowledge that the path he has chosen can only lead to his death, and his actions will have accomplished nothing in the end. The characters are realistic and the story is a gritty one. Yet it ends leaving one wishing the story would continue, and -- in fact -- it appears that Woodrell has left himself an opening for a sequel, if he decides he wishes to pen one. Again, this is a gritty tale, but a realistic and an interesting one, about a facet of the civil war of which many people are unaware.

The words I am struggling to come up with to describe the impact of this book on me just aren't there. It's analgous to someone seeing the Grand Canyon or the Pacific Ocean for the first time and being rendered totally speechless. I feel blown away, taken away, forever changed--all in positive ways--as a result of readin "Ride with the Devil." I'm going to give this book to my wife and beg her to read it, even though she is not the type to read books of this genre. This book transcends genre; it's just flat-out brilliant! Yes, it has some brutal scenes, but the touching and tender ones, along with the author's humor and mastery of language, will capture and change your heart. As I read this book, I found myself pausing a dozen or more times and quietly exclaiming, "What a writer!" This is the first Woodrell book I have read; I look forward to reading another one soon! By the way, if the cover of the book turns you off, just ignore it, for the axiom,"a cover can be misleading," may apply here.

I love to read history of any sort but I'm not particularly interested in the American Civil War or the "border wars" that accompanied it. Having said this, I could hardly put this book down. Woodrell writes as easily as a canary sings and is as evocative in his language as a Sunday preacher. Some readers may reel from the sheer volume of casual violence in this book but, after all, that is what it was like during this period of time and wishing it didn't happen doesn't make it go away. Remarkably, I didn't find the story line particularly significant and the ending won't make you gulp; it is the individual people, not the events --- not even the gangs --- that take center stage. I found that character development and the use of language set in the tapestry of the times the most engaging aspects of this remarkable book.

This is one of the best Civil War novels I've read. It deals with the border war in Missouri and Kansas, where atrocities on both sides were far too common. The author did a good job of getting the facts right and keeping the story interesting from start to finish. His sense of humor lightens up a story that would otherwise be pretty depressing. If you'd like an idea of what it was like to live in that part of the country during the war, read this book or watch the movie (which was also outstanding).

Whenever I read about the horrible things that happened in that part of the country, I'm amazed that the people there were able to put it behind them and get along after the war. It seems like it could easily have turned into our own version of the Middle East, where the fighting goes on generation after generation.

Civil war history buffs will love this novel, as the fiction dovetails quite well with historical facts. Some real-life characters appear briefly in this story (William Quantrill, Cole Younger and others) but not in a way that is disrespectful to historical accounts. One of the story's major fictional characters, Black John Ambrose, is evidently the real-life bushwacker Bloody Bill Anderson, who was notorious for his ruthless "no-parole" tactics. The story is full of wonderful conflicts. The main character, Jake Roedel, is distrusted by his Southern companions because of his German descent (most Germans were "Union men.") Yet the bushwacking band to which Jake belongs favors murdering his fellow Dutchmen. Another surprising character is Holt, the black man and former slave, fighting for the Southern cause out of loyalty to his 'owner' and friend George Clyde. I was also taken by the quality of the dialogue in this book. The characters speak with a language that is at once backwoodsy and eloquent. This book stands on it's own as a solid piece of work, but is even more enjoyable if you know some of the history on which it's based. For that, read The Devil Knows How To Ride (a Quantrill bio) by Edward Leslie. Then read this book, and while you're at it, rent the movie. You won't be sorry.

Distrust misspelled, error-laden reviews that call this book boring. It is anything but.

From page one, it is an engrossing story of life in the middle of a war machine, a whirlpool where the wrong look or word can find allies turned to enemies and where survival sometimes depends on doing things that will haunt you forever.

That is the position in which teenaged Jacob Roedel finds himself when he defies his Union-sympathizing father to follow his life-long friend, Jack Bull Chiles, into the ranks of a gang of Missouri-based Bushwhackers.

Jake's fellow Bushwhackers are a gang of cutthoats and bigots not easily trusting of a man who turns his back on his family's loyalties to fight with them.
They call Jake "Dutchy" and - when his father is killed - make no move to avenge the death, instead telling Jake that he basically should have expected to see his father dead, since Jake's own reputation was so notorious.

But as the war continues to take its toll, Jake increasingly questions the values and motives of the men he once called allies - and prompts the reader to do the same.