C.S.A.: Confederate States of America

I am in total agreement with twim2, 6/8/99, it's a fictional novel people! It's intention is to entertain - which it did. I commend Mr. Means for his imagination and insight. Unlike most of the other reviews, I didn't have a hard time suspending belief, anything is possible when it comes to power and control. After all, we're human beings with flaws, not gods. In my opinion, if the nay sayers would see these historical figures as the human beings they were, their belief system wouldn't have been so affected. What I find fascinating is that the same individuals that found this book unbelievable and offensive, don't have a problem admiring actual history and the individuals involved. There was nothing and nobody to admire during that period of time. As a matter of fact, we're still seeing the dreadful affects of it. I highly recommend this book, and have done so many times - the people that read it agreed.

I enjoyed Mr. Means' work and could not put it down. I thought to be a well told story of what might have happened if the South had actually won the War Between the States. I found Spencer Jefferson Lee to be a most capable president and that his Black Vice President Nathan Winston was a good man. In the Separate but Equal Society that Mr. Means created, Blacks seemed to me to have opportunities than they had in the real post-bellum South. Vice President Winston had been a well known academic before assuming the Vice Presidency and his wife Lucinda was an equally well known professor at the National University of the South. The only thing I found even remotely wrong with the book was that the gaps in History from 1866-2000 (i.e. what happened during World War II and Vietnam?) could have been filled in just a little bit better. Reading this book reminded me of things that people tend to forget. There were Blacks that actually fought WILLINGLY for the Southern cause and that the attitudes of people in the North were just as racist if not more so. To me, the racism of people in the North was brought forth when Vice President Winston's son John Henry was kidnapped. I also got the idea that the gap between the two races was narrowing when I read about the developing relationship between Jason Lee and Lucy Winston. I would highly reccomend this book to anyone - Northerner or Southerner!

... but I still have to say that the plot is riveting, the language sublime. So is his entertaining prose in this month's Washingtonian magazine. A splendid, imaginative novel.

The plot is riveting and the language is sublime

Means' book is a provocative meditation on race in America, packaged in a compelling page-turner of a novel. The parallel worlds of white and black that have emerged from a Confederate victory in the Civil War are unveiled in an intriguingly gradual fashion, allowing the reader to ponder how this America is different from our own. The whole is packaged in a thriller whose pace never flags. I found myself thinking about how much race relations in our country actually do, in practice, resemble Means' fanatically separate but equal order. Highly recommended.