A Year in the South: 1865: The True Story of Four Ordinary People Who Lived Through the Most Tumultuous Twelve Months in American History

Stephen Ash does an outstanding job of telling the story of four people living during The Civil War, and how their lives drastically changed as a result of the war. A Year in the South tells the story of four different people living in the South, season by season throughout 1865. Ash brings the reader inside the lives of these four people and explicitly details every problem, every setback and even every accomplishment that occurs within their lives which allows the reader to feel remorse for Cornelia and cheerful for Louis. This book is an amazing recreation of The Civil War era whether you read the entire book, or just each season from a single person's life.

I highly recommend this book. The stories are captivating. I didn't want it to end. As the review states, this book is about the lives of 4 ordinary people who lived through the Civil War. You will get caught up in the people and their lives. It's almost as if you know them personally. Great book!

Would you like some real insight into the lives of your ancestors during a portion of the Civil War? Do you wish you could take a time machine trip back to 1865 and feel what it was like for ordinary people, without Hollywood glamour, without layers of historical filters? Read this book, wherein author Stephen Ash recounts how the last year of the War Between the States affected the lives of four very different, very ordinary people. One is a widow struggling daily with crushing poverty. Another is a young man developing into a preacher. One is a former Confederate soldier trying to establish a new life and avoid the chaos around him and the fourth a slave whose inner desire for liberty cannot be extinguished. The travails and emotions of these people are easily recognizable to us today. In some measure you can vicariously experience this momentous period in our history through them. Their stories are individually compelling and wrenching for different reasons but you will not be able to escape caring for them. Ash follows each person through 1865, the year that saw the end of the war and the end of slavery. They each saw the year from very different vantage points but separately and together their stories reveal the typical. Ash avoids being broad, which would be vague and unsatisfactory to the reader. Further, he makes no judgements and allows these individuals to simply be who they are. What results is less the glossy, two dimensional portrait that one often finds when reading biographies of famous people and more the familial. I found the book captivating and I highly recommend it.

This book is a very, very good read. I am normally a very slow reader, but I finished this book in about two weeks. I read it before I went to bed, I read it at work, I read it in my spare time. I just couldn't get enough of it. The book follows four people in the South--one a slave, then a freedman; one a widow and refugee; one a former Confederate soldier who is moving towards the priesthood; and one a preacher who has lots of idle time--in differing locations. Their experiences tell the tale of the experiences of many Southerners at this time in history. As the author states in the foreword, though, this book does not attempt to claim that the experience of these four people can tell the tale of the entire South in 1865, but it gives us an understanding of what the experience was like for some people. The book is also interesting because most books of this nature stop with the end of the Confederacy, but this book deals with the whole year, so we get the reaction to the slaves being freed, Yankees occupying the South, the quest for jobs, and more. Overall, the book is well written and extremely interesting.

This was a wonderful book. Since it was a true story, it really gives you an inside look on these people and their lives. Stephen Ash doesn't sugar coat a thing and it gives you a wonderful perspective that you won't get in today's media or in an American History class.