Woe to Live On [Paperback]

Daniel Woodrell (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: August 1, 1998

In 1861, sixteen-year-old Jake joins the secessionist group known as the First Kansas Irregulars, and partakes in brutality excused in the name of retribution.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Narrator Jake Roedel is in his mid-teens when he joins the First Kansas Irregulars in 1861. During the next few years he sees, and commits, more than his share of Civil War atrocities. Most of the action takes place in Kansas and Missouri between the rebel Irregulars (bushwhackers) and the Union Jayhawkers, with some civilians caught in the crossfire. The studiedly cool Jake experiences loss (the deaths of his best friend, father and comrades) and love (the best friend's "widow"); he also learns about tolerance from his contact with a nobly reserved black Irregular. There's plenty of hard riding, drinking and shooting, most of it leading to bloodshed. Jake's loyalty to the "secesh" cause is unquestioning and doesn't quite gibe with his growing unease amid the gore, or with his departure in the midst of the war for Texas with wife and child. The prose is occasionally rather pretentious, but this is a generally enjoyable coming-of-age novel by the author of Under the Bright Lights.
Copyright 1987 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

Review

The Kansas City Star Woodrell joins Douglas C. Jones and the few others whose novels of western history are mainstream literature....The violence is fast and understated and bawdy humor relieves the story's intensity. -- Review --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 214 pages
• Publisher: Gallery; Reprint edition (August 1, 1998)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0671001361
• ISBN-13: 978-0671001360
• Product Dimensions: 7.7 x 5.4 x 0.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 7.2 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 4.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (29 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,194,868 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

46 of 46 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The war without bugles and banners, April 29, 2000

By A Customer

This review is from: Woe to Live On (Paperback)

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.

30 of 32 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars What's all the fuss about Cold Mountain?, November 14, 1999

By A Customer

This review is from: Woe to Live On (Paperback)

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?)

19 of 19 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Huck Finn in Hell, September 13, 2003

By 

S. Harris (Spotsylvania, VA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Ride With the Devil (Mass Market Paperback)

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.