Most Helpful Customer Reviews
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8 of 8 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
Great Material, Not So Great Presentation, November 20, 2008
Customer review from the Amazon Vine™ Program (What's this?)
During Prohibition and beyond, Forrest, Howard, and Jack Bondurant (the author's great-uncles and grandfather) decided that one way to keep their families going through the worldwide Spanish flu epidemic, Prohibition, the Great Depression, and a crippling drought was to found a moonshine dynasty. The infamous Bondurant brothers were major bootleggers in Franklin County, Virginia, which Sherwood Anderson, covering a story there, called "the wettest county in the world."
Although the material that Bondurant has to work with reflects a fascinating period in America's history, I found his presentation of it somewhat dry (no pun intended!) and often confusing. He chooses to use a straightforward prose style that minimizes punctuation; for example, quotation marks are eliminated altogether and commas nearly so. This style can be intrusive even in the best writers' hands (Cormac McCarthy comes to mind). There is, after all, good reason why punctuation was standardized to begin with: Remember your primary teachers telling you that it is meant to help the reader? It's true, for this reader at least.
Also, the novel jumps around in time, from 1918 to 1934 to 1928 to 1929 and again to 1934, back to 1919 then to 1930, and so on. To a limited extent, this approach helps pique the reader's interest, as when, for instance, we meet two of the Bondurants' competitors in the hospital, appallingly mutilated, while in the reader's mind the Bondurants are still just simple farming folk. Because the timeframe moves so frequently and randomly, though, the reader finds himself often disoriented and struggling to piece together the story. I repeatedly had to flip back to check what year it was and work out whether some earlier event was part of the foundation for what was happening now or whether it hadn't occurred yet.
Sherwood Anderson serves as a sort-of narrator, staying in Franklin County to do research to write about what was happening there. For the most part, this helps the novel, bringing to it an unenlightened point of view that parallels the reader's own. However, the frequent references to Anderson's testy relationship with other authors of his time, the building of his new house, and other details of his life outside of Franklin County add needless minutiae for the reader to sort through and allocate to their places in the story; ultimately, they have none, and seem to be mostly just an English major showing off.
I had a difficult time getting to know and care about the book's characters, at least partly because of the effort it took just to follow their stories. It wasn't until nearly the end of the book that it began to matter to me how any of it turned out. One of the parts I liked best was the brief author's note at the end, because by then I finally knew everyone and was interested in what had become of them. I wish the author had made this happen much earlier.
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11 of 13 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Enticing, Graphic, Americana, and Utterly Brilliant, October 30, 2008
Customer review from the Amazon Vine™ Program (What's this?)
I am a sucker for good historic fiction and this is an excellent slice of Americana from the red clay dirt of Virginia: Franklin County, to be exact. The story starts in 1918 with the introduction of the Bondurant family and the trials of the day - the great influenza epidemic. From there the story jumps to 1934 (current timeframe) and then to and from 1928 as it brings the background into the story. This is done very nicely and the story is brought together from several angles using the real life reporter/writer - Sherwood Anderson (author of Winesburg, Ohio - now available from the Guttenberg Project public domain), as way to tell the story from the present tense. Anderson mentions that he has had run-ins with Hemmingway and Billy Faulkner - and as I read this story, I couldn't help but to see Bondurant's attempt at a similar style to Faulkner, but with an updated and more modern flair. The characterizations are rich and peeled back like an onion to reveal layer after layer of the main characters' history and development. The author also uses a technique that I haven't seen - there are no quotations to delineate the verbalizations between characters. Not unlike some of the masters of the past, Bondurant has established a writing persona - i.e. Faulkner's use of not identifying the character and making the reader use their own identification through the conversation.
Matt Bondurant calls this a work of fiction based on fact from his family's legend - thereby giving the reader a glimpse into the Bondurant family tree. The time frame are the years just before prohibition has been extinguished, and the moonshine business is in full swing in Franklin County with the Bondurant brothers thick in it. There is a little of everything in this book and the author concisely tells the tale in about 300 pages. But the story is not just told to the reader, it is described in terrific detail with sometimes graphic and sometimes beautiful prose. As you are grabbed by the story, it is nearly impossible to put down this book.
The author has researched his subject material very well indeed. His depiction of this era is superb and the wording paints the mural so well the reader is visualizing the entire surroundings. You are in Franklin County and watching the events, not reading them. This is a brilliant work and well worth the time to read it - and it won't take you long, as I just couldn't stop until it was finished.
This is a slice of time in America that we can only read about and Matt Bondurant is able to give us this period of time and allows us to leave our current life and live within this one. Often people will ask why I read so many books, and I'll say that with a good book, I can be transported into the story, into a time that I never saw, or into a place that I'll never visit; this is one of those books. This not just a good book; I rarely give out 5 stars, but Matt Bondurant has earned all five of them with this potential classic.
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7 of 8 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Death in the Afternoon, October 20, 2008
Customer review from the Amazon Vine™ Program (What's this?)
To dismiss the infamous Bondurant brothers as simply country bootleggers would be selling them short....and risking your life.
They had carved a nice living as moonshiners in Franklin County, Virginia, but that is not even half of the story. Each played a role in the criminal success story due to very unique personalities; Jack was always angling to strike it rich through a big score, Howard was a haunted veteran of World War I who enjoyed drinking the hard stuff as much as marketing it and Forrest was a tough as they came - he had a deep neck scar to prove it - once walking nearly 12 miles in the snow to receive medical assistance for a slit throat.
But when the trio refuses to pay "security" money to police, it leads to an even more wild ride in the turf wars where only the strongest could survive to fight another day, where the battles during the waning years of the Great Depression included shootings, knifings, beatings, shakedowns and brutal types of revenge that were fates worse than death for men.
Author Matt Bondurant chronicles these turbulent times of his grandfather and two granduncles in this novel that is based on the true story of their lives and the ripping apart of the veil that covered the lawlessness through a 1935 conspiracy trial which took down many players, but found journalist Sherwood Anderson chasing the shadows of the brothers to get to the heart of the story while attempting to break the county code of silence found within this vicious game.
Through dialogue and gripping scenes that are not for the faint of heart, Matt Bondurant brings to life an era where big city gangsters may have captured the national headlines, but these rural areas packed a gangland cruelty that was especially brutal. And that Matt Bondurant is talking about family makes this story even more compelling.
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