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Title: Wilderness

Author: Lance Weller

Narrator: Richard Poe

Format: Unabridged

Length: 10 hrs and 54 mins

Language: English

Release date: 01-01-13

Publisher: Whole Story Audiobooks

Genres: Fiction, Historical

Publisher's Summary:

Thirty years ago, Abel Truman found himself on the wrong side in the Battle of the Wilderness, one of the bloodiest clashes of the American Civil War. Now an old and ailing man, Abel must make one heroic final journey over snowbound mountains. Abel's tortured and ultimately redemptive path leads him to change the lives of those he meets, as he encounters compassion amid brutality and tenderness within loss.

Members Reviews:

best western I have ever read

Ever since reading "Cold Mountain" I have been trying to find a book like it, not especially the romance part of that book but the adventure that the main character had when he walked home from the Civil War. I finally found it in this one.

Weller's writing is reminiscent of Cormac McCarthy's, but a McCarthy with emotions. I can read McCarthy and not feel much for what the characters are going through, whereas, Weller's writing makes me feel the pain and the sorrow of all involved. This has to be my favorite book after "The Road." I wish I could pick up another book by Weller, but this is one was his debut.

I don't think that I can say enough about his writing. It is so lyrical that every sentence is a poem and most of it could be written in free verse style. He writes in the way that I wish I could.

The pages are bound in one tragic story after another. This book got my mind off all other problems in our world by putting it on past history, on what the Civil War had done to humanity, which is something I hope we never repeat here in America, but which, sadly, is repeated daily in our world.

It is a story about Abel, a man who survived the Civil War, his last battle at Wilderness wounded him deeply and ended his career as a confederate soldier. He now lives in a shack on a beach in Washington with his faithful dog. It seems idyllic to me, but it doesn't last.

This book takes place in the present moment but it is also about remembering, remembering his wife and baby daughter and remembering the war.

"Abel lay back. He closed his eyes against the brightness of the night and listened to the constant sound of the ocean at its labors. Underbrush crackled softly as deer explored the slopes above the beach. Abel closed his eyes and tried hard not to see her, to keep seeing her. He tried not to see either of them, but it came back, like it always did, in the fall when the air grew crisp and the leaves began to turn, then die and fall."

There are other scenes in this book that will be forever engraved in my mind. I still see the image of a young boy named David, whose shirt was literally falling off his back and whose shoes were beyond repair. He finally gets a package from home, a handmade shirt from his mother that was made from a tablecloth, but even this gift is not without tragedy, little is in this book.

Abel says, "I seen things I can't forget. They won't turn me loose, and if they did, I can't imagine what I'd do with myself. Who I'd be."

Abel found one of his friends wounded at a military hospital in the wilderness, his arms cut off. And he didn't even know that they were gone. He even tried to shoo a fly off one of them but was unsuccessful. It reminded me of a book I had to read in college, "All Quiet of the Western Front" where a man had his legs blown off and was running around on stumps. How much I had wished I had never had to read that book. But this book is written beautifully, it wasn't.