|
|
Read the reviews...
Return to main book page...
|
|
|
| |
The Believer Magazine – October 2007 -- By
Nick Hornby -- THE WORLD MADE STRAIGHT: A Novel by Ron Rash,
Picador; Trade Paperback; 0-312-42660-7; $14.00; 304 pages --
THE WORLD MADE STRAIGHT really is
engrossing—indeed, the last devastating fifty-odd pages are almost
too compelling. You want to look away, but you can’t, and as a
consequence you have to watch while some bad men get what was coming
to them, and a flawed, likable man gets what you hoped he might
avoid. It’s a satisfyingly complicated story about second chances
and history and education and the relationships between parents and
their children; it’s violent, real, very well written, and it moves
like a train. Rash manages to convince you right from the first page
that his characters and his story are going to matter to you...
|
The Bloomsbury Review – July-August 2006 -- Excerpt
-- THE WORLD MADE STRAIGHT By Ron Rash. Henry Holt. 291 pages. $24.
-- Based in his native mountains of
western North Carolina, Ron Rash’s third novel is a powerful, and at
times hair-raising, story of historical loss and recovery, haunted
by the spirits of the Civil War that still breathe life or death
into our modern experience. For Appalachians, and the rest of the
nation, World Made Straight (Holt) is a brilliant reminder that the
past is often a prologue for our contemporary...
Read more...
|
Charlotte.com (NC) – June 16, 2006 -- Ghosts of
the massacre -- N.C. novelist is drawn back to the site of a
slaughter that still echoes in his family -- JOE DEPRIEST --
Novelist Ron Rash has heard them in a
far corner of Western North Carolina's Madison County. Nestled near
the Tennessee border, the Shelton Laurel valley is the spot where
Confederate troops turned on suspected Unionist sympathizers in
January 1863, killing 13 people, including a 12-year-old boy. Most
of the executioners and victims were neighbors...
Read more...
|
The Atlanta Journal Constitution – May 14, 2006 --
Past, present intersect in the Appalachians -- BY DONALD
HARINGTON -- Verdict: Rash is one of
the great novelists of our time.
Even apart from his alliterative name suggestive of impetuousness,
Ron Rash writes some of the most memorable novels of this young
century and brings to the task a poet's love of language and a short
story writer's sense of gripping plots. Rash's third novel, "The
World Made Straight," following close upon the grand fictions "One
Foot in Eden" and "Saints at the River," establishes him as one of
the major writers of our time. It further demonstrates his ability
to tell a contemporary Appalachian story that is strongly rooted in
that region's heart-rending past. In this new novel, 17-year-old
Travis Shelton is a...
|
The Post and Courier, Charleston, SC -- May
07, 2006 -- Civil War stains modern lives -- By Anne Moise --
In 1850, in the North Carolina
mountains, Dr. Joshua Candler treated Maggie Shelton for premature
labor. In 1859, he treated 8-year-old David Shelton for scarlet
fever. In 1863, the Confederate Dr. Candler witnessed and apparently
stood by as his unit slaughtered a group of Union sympathizers at
the community of Shelton Laurel...
Read more...
|
Los Angeles Times -- May 3, 2006 -- Probing the
South's sense of self -- By Tim Rutten --
POETS' novels tend to be finely wrought,
pretty failures — or worse. Ron Rash, a justly admired poet, is an
exhilarating exception, and his third book-length work of fiction,
"The World Made Straight," marks him as a major Southern writer. His
South, however, is not a place of gothic antebellum nostalgia, nor
of shabby gentility among the Spanish moss-draped ruins. Rash's
family has lived in the Carolina hill country since the 1700s,
and...
Read more...
|
The Charlotte Observer (NC) – April 30, 2006 --
The past below our feet -- Appalachia's long ago fuses with the
present in a story of harsh comeuppance -- ASHLEY WARLICK --
Travis Shelton is fishing for speckled
trout for truck insurance money when he comes upon a field of
marijuana plants. It's late 1970s, somewhere "back of beyond"
Madison County. Five stolen plants fetch him $60 from Leonard
Shuler, a railroaded ex-schoolteacher now selling pills and pot out
of a leaky trailer down the mountain. But when he goes back, and
boys like Travis always go back, he steps into a bear trap...
Read more...
|
The News & Observer (NC) – April 30, 2006 --
N.C. history haunts fine new novel --By Donald Harington --
Even
apart from his alliterative name suggestive of impetuousness, Ron Rash
writes some the most memorable novels of this young century, and brings to
the task a poet's love of language and a short-storyist's sense of gripping
plots.
His third novel, "The World Made Straight," following close upon "One Foot
In Eden" and the award-winning "Saints at the River," establishes Rash as a
major writer. It further demonstrates his ability to tell a contemporary
Appalachian story that is strongly rooted...
Read more...
|
Bookpage – April 2006 -- Southern shades and
shadows -- BY TIM DAVIS -- Seventeen-year-old Travis Shelton
lives in the mountains of western North Carolina. and when Ron
Rash's superb tale of redemption and healing begins, young Travis
knows little of his family's or his region's history. "Haunted by
shades… as if created by the mountains' light -starved ridges and
coves" the Shelton family's dark heritage from the Civil War is the
reason the rural county in which they have lived for nearly 200
years is known as "Bloody Madison." Indifferent about the past,
Travis finds that the present becomes complicated when he has an
encounter with Carlton Toomey. One of the most enigmatic men...
Read more...
|
Booklist February 15, 2006 -- Rash Ron, The World Made Straight, Henry Holt (304 pp.) $24, Apr. 8, 2006,
ISBN: 0-8050-7866-5 -- High-schooler Travis Shelton steals one too many
marijuana plants from vicious tobacco-farmer-turned-drug-dealer
Carlton Toomey and ends up caught in a bear trap, his foot so
mangled he needs surgery. Travis' stern father kicks him out, and he
ends up bunking at the rundown trailer of bookish Leonard Shuler, a
low-level drug dealer and former schoolteacher who lost his job and
his family because...
Read more...
|
Publishers Weekly – January 30, 2006 -- The
World Made Straight, RON RASH. Holt, $24 (304p) ISBN 0-8050-7866-5
-- Rash’s finely wrought third novel
(after Saints at the River) follows the wayward trajectory of
high school dropout Travis Shelton, who stumbles on a neighbor’s
crop of marijuana while out fishing in Madison County, N.C. He
steals a few plants to sell to Leonard Shuler, a divorced and
disgraced former high school teacher, who is living in a trailer and
selling drugs. Travis has a violent run-in with the
father-and-son...
Read more...
|
Kirkus – January 15, 2006 -- Rash Ron, The
World Made Straight, Henry Holt (304 pp.) $24, Apr. 8, 2006, ISBN:
0-8050-7866-5 -- Civil War ghosts hover over a scrappy teenager and
his surrogate father in a Southern tale that mixes suspense,
coming-of-age and historical elements. Travis Shelton is a
daredevil, a 17-year-old high-school dropout, bitterly at odds with
his mean-spirited daddy, a tobacoo farmer in the North Carolina
mountains. Leonard Shuler, 20 years his senior, is a bootlegger,
drug-dealer and former techer who lost his job, wife and beloved
daughter after being the innocent victim of a drug bust...
Read more...
|
| |
|
