May’s book selection for ChocLit Guild was April 1865: The Month That Saved America. Have I mentioned how much I adore my book club? We have read a stellar variety of books over the years. Many of the books I never would have read on my own, but became instant favorites, including Watership Down, Three Cups of Tea, What’s So Amazing About Grace, and Our Hearts Were Young and Gay. (How’s that for variety?)
April 1865 was immediately placed on my Books Every American Should Read list. Fabulous. Intelligent. Insightful. Jay Winik is a storytelling master in this work. It is all at once a crash course in the founding of our country, an overview of the Civil War (beginning to end), multiple biographies (Robert E. Lee, Grant, Sherman, Lincoln, Jefferson Davis, John Wilkes Booth, Thomas Jefferson, and many more), and a beacon of hope for our future… all anchored by the month of April, 1865.
pg. 379Instead, April was that magic moment when these ideas joined together. Amid the long lists of heroic and historic actions for this country, April 1865 was incontestably one of America’s finest hours: for it was not the deranged spirit of an assassin that defined the country at war’s end, but the conciliatory spirit of leaders who led as much in peace as in war, warriors and politicians who, by their example, their exhortation, and their deeds, overcame their personal rancor, their heartache, and spoke as citizens of not two lands, but one, thereby bringing the country together. True, much hard work remained. But much, too, had already been accomplished.
Winik does not present a fairy tale, but, I believe, accurately portrays the atmosphere, the events, and the cast of characters with realistic, carefully researched details and magnificent insight. Utilizing his degree in international relations and experience and research in international conflicts, Winik contrasts the Civil War’s ending with other civil wars around the globe, and throughout history. Our Civil War becomes a vivid miracle of reconciliation.
pg. 383As Lincoln understood most poignantly, it is not merely how arms are taken up, and why, but equally how they are laid back down, and why. And what then follows.
One of my favorite moments of this book unfolds in the Epilogue: To Make a Nation. The author wells up a spring of hope in the reader with mysterious glimpses into the lives of unassuming citizens of our nation at the end of the Civil War. Citizens with names such as Remington, Carnegie, Woolworth, and Ford. A veritable world of possibility.
Read this book. And don’t miss Uncle Tom’s Cabin and To Kill a Mockingbird if you’re making a list….