Review by New York Times Review
THE Civil War was not a simple collision of opposites. There was internal dissent on each side: Northerners who wanted to placate the South, Southerners loyal to the Union, and thousands of deserters from both armies. In "The State of Jones," Sally Jenkins, a Washington Post reporter, and John Stauffer, a Harvard historian, recreate the life and times of the bold Southern dissenter Newton Knight An indigent farmer in Jones County, Miss., the flinty, blue-eyed Knight was conscripted into the Southern army in 1862 and soon deserted. He organized a small band of neighbors that used guerilla tactics and swamp hideouts to fend off pursuing Confederate troops. Knight's vastly outnumbered group became a thorn in the side of the South, which was preoccupied with the invasions of Grant and Sherman. Knight and other Jones County residents aided the North during Reconstruction. Although Knight was married to a white woman and had several children by her, he simultaneously had a long-term liaison with a former slave of his grandfather, named Rachel. At a time when most Mississippi blacks did not own land, he deeded farmland to Rachel, with whom he had a number of children who worked side by side in the fields with their white siblings. Jenkins and Stauffer suggest that Knight was a religiously inspired antislavery warrior who "fought for racial equality during the war and after" and "forged bonds of alliance with blacks that were unmatched even by Northern abolitionists." But Knight poses special challenges for biographers. He comes down to us mainly through second-hand accounts, such as his white son Tom's sometimes-unreliable 1934 biography. There's the rub. Jenkins and Stauffer create a lively narrative, but is it factual - or fictionalized, like the movie script about Knight by the screenwriter Gary Ross, which, the authors report, inspired them to write the book? These issues are the subject of an Internet debate that began when Victoria Bynum, a Texas State history professor and author of the well-researched 2001 book "The Free State of Jones," wrote a review on her blog, Renegade South, in which she characterized Jenkins and Stauffer's book as a good read but inaccurate and unjustifiably politicized. Jenkins and Stauffer responded with counterevidence and claimed that Bynum had launched "turf warfare" to promote her own book. Others joined the exchange, pointing out small factual errors made by Jenkins and Stauffer, as well as the larger one that Jones County did not officially secede from the Confederacy, invalidating their book's subtitle. The dearth of dependable primary evidence about Knight forces Jenkins and Stauffer to rely often on conjecture. Their book fills lacunas with words like "perhaps," "it is possible," "likely," "could have," and so on. More than 50 pages is devoted to Knight's war experiences, hard information about which is scant. One battle described, Vicksburg, may have little bearing on his biography, since, as an endnote says, "there is no absolute proof that Newton was at Vicksburg, and a case can be made that he was not." (Bynum gives evidence that he was not.) It's impossible to gauge Knight's alleged early antislavery views, as Jenkins seems to concede in a blog comment: "We don't say categorically he was antislavery before the war." Jenkins and Stauffer describe the ex-slave Rachel as a caring soulmate who symbolized Knight's forward-looking capacity to reach across the racial divide. But we can't be sure, since, as the authors write, "there is precious little direct evidence of their relationship." Jenkins and Stauffer bring historical contexts to life and offer provocative interpretations, but they pile hunch upon hunch about Knight himself. Unless a new cache of sources about his life turns up, he'll remain as elusive to biographers as he was to the Confederate troops that chased him through the wooded marshes of Jones County. David S. Reynolds is a distinguished professor at the CUNY Graduate Center. His most recent book is "Waking Giant: America in the Age of Jackson."
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [October 27, 2009]
Review by Booklist Review
*Starred Review* In our review of the late Larsson's first novel, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (2008), we commented that the charismatic computer hacker Lisbeth Salander stole the show from her costar, journalist Mikail Blomkvist. In the second of Larsson's three novels, Salander and Blomkvist return, but this time the focus is mainly on Salander, and thank God for that! She is one of the most compelling characters to strut the crime-fiction stage in years, and it's a great shame that she will have such a short run. This time the plot begins, as did the previous book, with investigative journalism: Millennium, the magazine Blomkvist publishes, is about to do a story exposing the Swedish sex-trafficking trade when the authors of the story are both murdered, and Salander's fingerprints are found on the gun. Larsson jumps between Blomkvist's attempts to investigate the murder (and, he hopes, prove Salander's innocence) and Salander's own efforts to tie the killings to her past. It is that backstory that drives the novel: a ward of the state after being institutionalized as a teenager, following the day when All the Evil occurred, Salander has fought through a lifetime of abuse, familial and institutional, surviving through iron will and piercing intelligence. Whether those qualities will see her through yet again remains in doubt, even beyond the last page of this suspenseful, remarkably moving novel. Salander is one of those characters who come along only rarely in fiction: a complete original, larger than life yet firmly grounded in realistic detail, utterly independent yet at her core a wounded and frightened child. This is the best Scandinavian novel to be published in the U.S. since Smilla's Sense of Snow.--Ott, Bill Copyright 2009 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Fans of intelligent page-turners will be more than satisfied by Larsson's second thriller, even though itÅfalls short of the high standard set by its predecessor, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, which introduced crusading journalist Mikael Blomkvist and punk hacker savant Lisbeth Salander. A few weeks before Dag Svensson, a freelance journalist, plans to publish a story that exposes important people involved in Sweden's sex trafficking business based on research conducted by his girlfriend, Mia Johansson, a criminologist and gender studies scholar, the couple are shot to death in their Stockholm apartment. Salander, who has a history of violent tendencies, becomes the prime suspect after the police find her fingerprints on the murder weapon. While Blomkvist strives to clear Salander of the crime, some far-fetched twists help ensure her survival. Powerful prose and intriguing lead characters will carry most readers along. (Aug.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review
Lisbeth Salander, the antisocial but brilliant computer hacker who helped journalist Mikael Blomkvist uncover a serial killer on a remote Swedish island in Larsson's acclaimed The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, takes center stage in this second volume of his "Millenium" trilogy. Opening 18 months after the events of the first book, the novel finds our heroine lounging by the pool at a Caribbean hotel, reading a math textbook, and watching a woman who may be a victim of domestic abuse, while in Sweden, Blomkvist, bewildered by Salander's abrupt disappearance from his life, is set to publish a magazine exposé on the sex trade. Impatient readers may chafe at this seemingly irrelevant prolog, but like the mathematical puzzles Salander enjoys solving, there is a logic to the clues that Larsson carefully drops--integral to understanding his protagonist as we gradually learn her back story. The main plot takes off with the murders of Salander's legal guardian and the two writers of the article, and her fingerprints are found on the gun used in the killings. VERDICT Although the pace slows when the police investigation takes precedence and Salander briefly disappears from the action, we are well-rewarded in the exciting final section when she finally confronts her dark past. This is complex and compelling storytelling at its best, propelled by one of the most fascinating characters in recent crime fiction. Eager fans will placing library holds for the final volume, The Girl Who Kicked the Hornets' Nest, scheduled for a 2010 U. S. publication. [See Prepub Alert, LJ 4/1/09; see also the Q&A with Knopf editor in chief Sonny Mehta and executive director of publicity Paul Bogaards on p. 60.--Ed.]--Wilda Williams, Library Journal (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
