Review: The March by E. L. Doctrow

What the producers said
In 1864, after Union general William Tecumseh Sherman burned Atlanta, he marched his sixty thousand troops east through Georgia to the sea, and then up into the Carolinas. The army fought off Confederate forces and lived off the land, pillaging the Southern plantations, taking cattle and crops for their own, demolishing cities, and accumulating a borne-along population of freed blacks and white refugees until all that remained was the dangerous transient life of the uprooted, the dispossessed, and the triumphant.

My Turn: Two Paws Up!
In Doctrow’s characteristic style, colorful characters’ lives are intertwined with those of famous people. His accounts of Civil War medicine is vivid and accurate, even some of the details that aren’t widely known i.e. the President was attended by doctors who knew little about medicine and more about paperwork. The higher-ranking doctors with little practical experience dismissed a younger surgeon with extensive know-how in treating trauma. These Administrative docs proceeding to examine and treat Lincoln with out-dated methods and may have hastened his death.

Another thing that amazes me is the numbers of dead – 20,000 at one battle, 10,000 at another and so on. It's hard to imagine just what that means in terms of burying the dead and caring for the injured. Having a fair understanding of what it takes to keep a military group fed, clothed, sheltered and motivated to continue, I just wonder how they kept it up for four long years with so few of the bare necessities!

Just thinking about the things they did NOT have gives me a headache: Nothing was clean and certainly not sterile, no blood transfusions, no I.V fluids, no N/g tubes, no trachs, no antibiotics. The opium-based laudanum was used for everything but it was often in short supply.

Good book. Highly recommend it to Civil War buffs, folks interested in medical history and Doctrow fans. This one was every bit as good as Ragtime or Welcome to Hard Times