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Title: The Color of Lightning

Author: Paulette Jiles

Narrator: Jack Garrett

Format: Unabridged

Length: 13 hrs and 33 mins

Language: English

Release date: 03-31-09

Publisher: HarperAudio

Ratings: 4.5 of 5 out of 157 votes

Genres: Fiction, Historical

Publisher's Summary:

Samuel Hammond follows a different road west. A Quaker whose fortune is destroyed by a capricious act of an inscrutable God, he has resigned himself to the role the Deity has chosen for him. As a new agent for the Office of Indian Affairs, it is Hammond's goal to ferret out corruption and win justice for the noble natives now in his charge. But the proud, stubborn people refuse to cease their raids, free their prisoners, and accept the farming implements and lifestyle the white man would foist upon them, adding fuel to smoldering tensions that threaten to turn a man of peace, faith, and reason onto a course of terrible retribution.

A soaring work of the imagination based on oral histories of the post - Civil War years in North Texas, Paulette Jiles's The Color of Lightning is at once an intimate look into the hearts and hopes of tragically flawed human beings and a courageous reexamination of a dark American ...

Editorial Reviews:

Is anyone not fascinated by cases of captives who lived among Indians and escaped to tell about it? This novel opens with a Kiowa raid on settlers in northern Texas in the 1870s. So convincingly does Jiles imagine her characters - Indian, white, and black - and compellingly tell their stories that it comes as a surprise that much here is based on real people and events. Jack Garrett's performance is stellar. Three different races - men, women, and children - come vividly to life, their personalities distinct even though their stories are separated from ours by more than a century. It's a sweeping tale, never dry or fact-bound, and Garrett's sympathetic attention and unflagging skill are a perfect match for Jiles's marvelous invention.

Members Reviews:

Not for the faint of heart or weak of stomach.

Would you consider the audio edition of The Color of Lightning to be better than the print version?

Did not read the print. Learned to enjoy audio books when I drove an 18 wheeler. Still use them to multitask.

Who was your favorite character and why?

Britt Johnson. Oh to have someone love me that much/

Which character as performed by Jack Garrett was your favorite?

Britt Johnson.

Any additional comments?

Do not read at the dinner table.

A DIFFERENT "COWBOYS AND INDIANS WESTERN"

This is not a typical tale of cowboys and Indians, but a well written look at at the period of the great American expansion into the west. When major social shifts occur, a period of of time between the ending of one era and the start of the next is created. These periods of tension and unrest often raise hard questions about the changes intended to solve problems. Jiles raises some questions about the goals of the Civil War and of the countrys western expansion.

Her characters are well developed. Britt, a legally free Black man whose wife Mary and children are taken during a Commanche and Kiowa Indian raid and an Agent of the Indian Affairs Agency, Samuel, from an old Quaker family Back East.

When free Coloreds, Indians who are required to live on reservations, Comancheros from New Mexico and south of the Rio Grande, and mixed race people from the interbreeding among captives and captors of all races are thrown together in a time of unrest, strong ethnic, religious and political emotions, Jiles gives us a bit of the history of North Texas.

Samuel devoutly defends and tries to live his Quaker faith in non-violence.