I’m really at a loss on what to read next so I am going back through the New York Times Notable Books of the last twenty years. Right now I’m in 2003, which brings me this story of the American civil war, ENEMY WOMEN.
I feel like I know a lot about the combatant experience of the civil war (in this blog alone in the last couple of years THE MARCH by EL Doctorow, and MARCH by Geraldine Brooks). This though tells the civilian story, and in particular a female civilian. It is pretty hair-raising stuff, as the protagonist Adair struggles to walk across Missouri accompanied only by her incurable TB.
Bit of a side bar, but I had often heard of the huge flocks of passenger pigeons that used to exist in America, and this book contains a lovely imagining of them, perhaps the first I have ever read (If you have never heard of this, get googling, it is really bad. Flocks were so large it would take them three DAYS to fly past a single spot, with as many as 300 MILLION each hour. It is mind-blowing we managed to exterminate them in under 50 years). Anyway, here it is:
All around her their droppings cracked on the leaves on the ground, and once she heard a limb breaking from the weight of a hundred doves who had fluttered down to crowd onto it. It was a storm of doves, the sunlight became dim was it would dim in an eclipse and she rode hard to get away from them. She rode ten miles at a trot before they were clear of them. She and the horses both walked into a wide pool of water in a stream and washed themselves clean.