Gone With The Wind [Paperback] [Jan 01, 2017] MARGARET MITCHELL

I spent over 12 hours today finishing this book. 1037 pages! 1. Because I wanted to know what was going to happen! 2. I have no sort of life so I can do this from time to time.I can not believe it took me so long to read this book! I didn't think it would be my kind of book and I have never watched the movie <---I did order the blu-ray on Amazon today because I have to see it soon! I must say that GOODREADS has been a blessing and a curse in this department. I have broadened my horizons since being on GOODREADS from reading books my friends are reading or have read and this is one of them. I would have missed out on this book!This book has so many feels for me:DisgustSadnessRageShockI invested so much into so many characters. So many characters that died, that I loved... ones that didn't even have much of a role in the story, I loved them. I thought this was just a love story around the war, but it's so much more. Dear God, Margaret Mitchell knew how to write a book about it all. No holds barred!I have to make a small mention that I was born in Tennessee and it was so weird reading a bit part about Chattanooga (where I live now) in the book. I guess the biggest part was reading about the battle at Chickamauga, GA. I live 20 minutes from the Chickamauga Battlefield in Ga and used to hike it for many years with my dog and my father until things in my life went wrong. I have to say it's a most beautiful place with all of the land, wildlife, monuments, store, a lot of things. It's a lot nicer now that I would think back then during the war.I had this love/hate relationship with Scarlett. I thought she was a spoiled, selfish person and the way she treated people and her own children were appalling. I loved that she was a crude business woman and just got it done. One of her slaves named Pork (who I loved) told her if she was as nice to white people as she was to black folk that the world might like her. But Scarlett didn't care, she said what she wanted and did what she wanted.She didn't want to take care of Melanie when the soldiers were coming. She hated Melanie because she was married to Ashley, the man she always wanted. It was off the rails with all of that with him. Scarlet jumped right on the crazy train with that one and it cost her in the end. But Scarlet stayed with Melanie when she had her baby and got her to safety at Scarlett's home Tara. She took care of everyone in the family.. say what you want.. but -SHE.DID.NOT.LET.THEM.STARVE.--->EXCERPT<---Hunger gnawed at her empty stomach again and she said aloud: "As God is my witness, as God is my witness, the Yankees aren't going to lick me. I'm going to live through this, and when it's over, I'm never going to be hungry again. No, nor any of my folks. If I have to steal or kill--as God is my witness, I'm never going to be hungry again."--->END EXCERPT<---Scarlett hated every moment of taking care of her family. Of worrying about others, but she did it. In a war that was senseless.Margaret Mitchell told everything like it is, laid it out bare for us to cringe and hate and cry. So many things were so wrong, but it was what it was...My favorite character was Melanie. She was such a kind soul, but she had her moments when she got her backbone on and told people like it was, and they respected her because of this kindness. She was married to Ashley and I thought she was going to die in childbirth but she lived through it. It wasn't her time yet.I loved Scarlett's dad a lot - Gerald O'Hara. This is where Scarlett got her temper. But he was a funny man, a good man to his family and people and animals. I loved Mrs. Tarleton, Grandma Fontaine, Mammy, Uncle Peter.. there are so many I can't even name them all and like I said before some were only in the book a few times.Scarlett married twice and had two children. She didn't care for children and she didn't care for her husbands, she just did what she did to get what she needed.I had a love/hate relationship with Rhett too. Back in those days it was okay but he was a way older man taking up or trying to take up with a younger girl in Scarlett. But it wasn't just that he just got on my nerves with is comings and goings. I think if he really loved Scarlett for that long he should have told her and wooed her and then maybe things would have turned out differently. I have no idea.Scarlett did have a child with Rhett as well. Things were all good in the home for a while and then things went way down hill....... It was sad to read, hard to read. I wish the ending was different, but it wasn't. It was an extremely sad ending for two different reasons and I won't give those away. I know most people have probably read the book or watched the movie a million times and already know but still. I cried and cried! :-(This is a tremendously heartbreaking book, but I'm so, so glad that I read it!

Margaret Mitchell's requiem of the South succeeds to embrace both the reader and her topic because of the tremendous blend of themes which resound throughout this masterful novel.First, she introduces us to the concept of peace versus war: "All wars are sacred, to those who have to fight them. If the people who started them did not make wars sacred, who would be foolish enough to fight?" And, of course business pragmatist Rhett Butler concludes, "All wars are in realty money squabbles. But so few people ever realize it. Their ears are too full of bugles and drums . . . " This dialogue of sanctity of war versus business pragmatism constantly resounds in the book.Secondly, is how men treat other men. And, within this theme are numerous subtopics. The most obvious is the North versus the South. "Arrogance and callousness for the conquerors, bitter endurance and hatred for the conquered." When you start a war - know that at the end you still have an enemy, and that enemy's feelings toward you may be stronger and more bitter! The other obvious theme is white versus black. Slavery versus freedom for the "darkies." And, although that serfdom appears to symbiotically exist in the Camelot of the Georgian south, Ashley Wilkes tells Scarlett O'Hara at one time that had there been no war and had his father died with slavery still intact, he would have freed his slaves as his methodically conceived logical conclusion was to do the right thing : free men.Ashley Wilkes, who displays another great theme of old antebellum South's gentlemen in the new world of the Reconstruction South, is both hero and goat. Rhett Butler always tells Scarlett that Ashley's days of importance ended when his environs were burnt to ashes at the war's end. She never agrees, at least until the end. And, while she disagrees with Rhett about Ashley, they gang up on her on yet another masterful man versus man theme: employment of convict labor. Treated worse than slaves, convicts are the backbone to cheap labor after the war. But, for their hard work they are beaten and fed little and paid less. Ashley, in her post-starvation period, will do almost everything to avoid experiencing hunger again - including hiring white northerners to be her conscripted laborers.Thirdly, we learn about truth versus appearance. Rhett and most of the old South depict the wonderment of southern civility - never say a bad thing about anyone, and always show respect and manners to those about you. This applies to many slaves as well. Ashley and his wife, Melanie (Melly), are embodiments of such gentile mannerisms. Scarlett's mother Ellen was another. Scarlett's father, Gerald O'Hara, and Scarlett are not. But, Scarlett and her father were truthful. The Irish in father and daughter refused to fub, they refused to be concerned about the foderol scurried about by gossip - holding such lack of care when the idle gossip festered to outright defamatory lies. Rhett, who loves the lack of deception in Scarlett's character, often criticizes his peers for their hypocrisy. Rhett admits to engaging in the same for purposes of business; but, as a man he refuses to be known as another who says what he does not mean. But, Rhett, as time progresses in the book, succumbs to the gossip and engages in the very hypocrisy he despises.Fourthly, the issue of uneven playing field resounds. Rich versus poor. Slave owner versus slave. Business owner versus convict labor. South versus North. And, hidden within these themes is Mitchell's greatest announcement: feminism. Scarlett who owns businesses after the war, is criticized by all men and societal women for engaging in a man's world. Even with her success, she is snubbed by the hob nob crowd. But, perhaps greatest in this theme is the concept of men having rights which women cannot. Rhett gallivants with the local prostitute Belle without concern, while one emotional hug held by life-long friends and neighbors Scarlett and Ashley is identified as "adultery." When Rhett confronts her about this, Scarlett retaliates, "You are nothing but a drunken beast who's been with bad women so long that you can't understand anything else but badness. You've lived in dirt too long to know anything else. You are jealous of something you can't understand. Good night."Other themes also exist: building versus destroying; growing up versus growing old; Catholics versus Christians; love for family versus love for spouses; raising children versus burying children . . .As these themes ebb and flow and occasionally eddy in this ocean-sized novel, the characters' personalities grow and become embodiments of many stereotypical Southern mainstays. And, to add to the characters, Mitchell uses incredibly detailed phonetic spellings for the crackers' and slaves' dialogues. Her detailed description of people's clothing and household interiors (and exteriors) brand indelible images into the readers' minds. This is writing!Mitchell, whose own life is a mixture of angelic Melly and defiant Scarlett, had three marriages and worked (as a journalist) in a man's world. She knew that her publication would be much more difficult than a man's work - especially one of such largess. But, like Scarlett, she persevered and triumphed. Mitchell's name remains among the most known in the American literary world - not bad for a small girl from Atlanta.So many passages of this book flow with delicate prose that make it an incredibly easy 960-page read. In Pat Conroy's preface, that great southern writer states, "This is The Illiad with a Southern accent, burning with the humiliation of Reconstruction. . . Gone with the Wind was not just a book, it was an answer, a clenched fist raised to the North, an anthem of defiance. If you could not defeat the Yankees on the battlefield, then by God, one of your women could rise from the ashes of humiliation to write more powerfully than the enemy and all the historians and novelists who sang the praises of the Union."

Re-reading `Gone With the Wind' I still think, as I did upon my first reading sixteen years ago, that the novel is harsher and less romanticized than the classic film. It also possesses a denseness of detail, both of the historical era and the actions and thoughts of the primary characters than the film was able to convey. I think one of its most significant achievements was in placing at the heart of it the least self-aware character in the novel, a thoroughly selfish and vain woman, a spoiled adult child only different from her chronological childhood in that she has more spectacular toys to play with or to desire, with greater stakes involved in acquiring and keeping them. That Mitchell places us in the mind and machinations of this unscrupulous character and yet enables us to understand her and stay with her saga for a thousand pages is a major accomplishment.There were headstrong female lead characters in American and European fiction before `Gone With the Wind'--Becky Sharpe in Thackeray's `Vanity Fair' comes to mind as perhaps the closest to resembling Scarlet as a predecessor; the proud and independent Elizabeth Bennett in Austen's `Pride and Prejudice'; characters that marry the wrong people for the wrong reasons such as Dorothea Brooke in George Eliot's `Middlemarch' and Isabel Archer in Henry James' `The Portrait of a Lady.' Yet none of these characters are so utterly clueless as Scarlett about the psychology of the characters surrounding her. Scarlett sees everyone through the prism of her massive, endless hunger for anything that gratifies her ego.And yet we are compelled to read on, to follow her through her paces and find out what she won't do to fulfill her selfish desires. Children are an unwelcome annoyance and not one of her three children from three separate marriages elicit any kind of unconditional, maternal love from her. In fact, one of the weaknesses of the novel is the sense that Mitchell almost forgets that Scarlett is the mother of three children, as often as they make their appearance. She proceeds through the novel like a single, unattached woman and is so unfettered by filial attachment, despite her claim that she is working so hard to ensure the survival of the rest of her clan at Tara in the lean years after the devastation the Union wreaked upon the South and that the price she pays for this sacrifice is to be in almost constant exile from her beloved family home. The film simplified the parental issue by giving her one child and a pregnancy with another. Both are dispatched through fatal accidents.Scarlett's clueless cynicism is contrasted with Melanie Wilkes' saintly refusal to believe anything but the best in everyone until proved otherwise. This obliviousness makes her the perfect unwitting victim of Scarlett's duplicity. Only that absolute, unquestioning devotion enables Scarlett to spend so many years deceiving Melanie into believing her to be honorable, giving her ample opportunities to be exactly the opposite.Her opportunism is contrasted with the equally opportunistic nature of Rhett Butler, who would be the perfect soul mate for Scarlett if she could only disabuse herself of her futile fantasy that Melanie's husband Ashley in his heart loves only her, Scarlett, refusing to countenance any of the evidence that proves the contrary. Rhett is a realist, amazingly detached and objective about his native culture. He knows the Old South is dying and takes advantage of the fact that as much financial gain can be made from the fall of a culture as from a rise.Mitchell's other major coup with this novel is in making both of her majn characters social outsiders attempting to join clubs that will not have them for members, both with questionable moral integrity, and rendering them sympathetic even though most of their compatriots refuse to bestow anything but grudging respect. This novel is possibly unique in the fact that its heroine learns far less about herself throughout the novel than almost any other character.Unlike Scarlett. Rhett learns to move on and stop beating his head against a wall. He's devoted enough energy on all levels to Scarlett and he has the sense to move on with his life. Scarlett has the dawning of an awareness of other people's perspectives but her mantra, "I'll think about it tomorrow; after all, tomorrow is another day' indicates to me that she will continue to perpetuate the cycle of behavior that has propelled her throughout her life and will be doomed to repeat it ad infinitum. She may love Rhett but only to the extent that he gives her exactly what she wants in the way she wants it. She has looked on her surviving children as nuisances so long that their fear and distrust of her may flare up into active resentment and hate, so she has no consolation from them. She has evolved perhaps a centimeter from the beginning to the end of the novel.Despite the novel's faults, it is a grand and ambitious linguistic structure, a sincere attempt to capture the essence of the culture of the South through the years encompassing the Civil War and its aftermath. Although Mitchell would probably balk at the mention of her name in the same breath with ambitious literary masters such as Tolstoy and Hugo who also attempted to capture the essence of a society in flux at a pivotal moment in its history, the ambition of `Gone With the Wind' is indeed comparable in its use of broad canvases and large personal gestures. Perhaps it never will be considered one of the greatest American novels although its ambitious scope could be compared with the best European novels and, for good or ill, it has distilled a very potent image of the chapter in our history that has been rightly referred to as `The American Iliad.'

I am so excited about this book, but I have to finish it first with Jack Reacher (six books of set). I loved it! So I can't wait to read it on the next one....! If you are a senior with eyes problem like reading, these prints are super small.

I saw the movie before I read the book, and I thought it would be too much to read a book that was so long. But I was enthralled by the 2nd page, by the descriptions and the dialogue. The rest of the novel kept me enthralled because of the unconventionality of Scarlett and Rhett, and the messages about war, the finished past and the unavoidable future of the South in the mid-1800's. I loved the richness of the descriptions of the Old South, which made me feel so nostalgic even though I'm not even from the South! Also, I found the many characters to be well-developed and each major character had a distinct and sympathizable personality.My favorite parts are the ones with Scarlett and Rhett at each others' throats, before and during their "courtship" and even after they were married. Their dialogue is hilarious and clever, though admittedly the wit is all from Rhett and the amusement comes from seeing Scarlett brought down a few notches. Though it hurts to know that even though Scarlett FINALLY matures enough to dump Ashley and realize she needed to change, Rhett is no longer willing to give her another chance. It seems whenever Scarlett is actually sincere about something nobody believes her or is willing to give her the benefit of the doubt (except Melanie of course). What's great about the novel is that if one was one of the characters, he would just see Scarlett on the surface: selfish, conniving and coy, but with the narration, one can see where Scarlett is coming from, and actually sympathize with her actions. She was definitely a woman born in the wrong era. She would do just fine in the 21st Century.Scarlett is very much my favorite character, because even with her insensitivity, selfishness, and materialism, she is oftentimes the strongest person in the passel of main characters. She worked to the bone when she returned to Tara, knowing that her hands would have to be ruined in order to eat and live and provide for the family that looked to her for leadership. Sometimes it seemed she was the only practical, level-headed person in the whole book (excepting Rhett), especially since people like Suellen were just refusing to work because it was "beneath" them, refusing to admit things have changed and work had to be done. Scarlett knows what she wants and has the sense to go ahead and try to get it.Although, many times Scarlett's selfishness comes up so unexpectedly I burst out laughing at the outrageousness of her personality. For example there would be a long conversation or narrative about how the past was so beautiful and peaceful or about a nice thing a person has done, and the book has Scarlett completely overturn the comments with her contemptous thoughts on the contrary of what was just described. Her problem is that though she sees what's in front of her, she doesn't get the POINT of what she's seeing. Hence the character of Rhett. He is so much like her, but he is able to see what she misses. He points them out to her plainly, and in Rhett Scarlett meets her match. He has what she's missing. As a result, another piece of the novel comes together: through Rhett, Scarlett is able to mature and bridge, to an extent, the gap between the ideals of people living in the past and those living in the present. Unfortunately, this maturation is not without consequences.Because of Scarlett's headstrong personality, I found GWTW endlessy amusing, and I think it was meant to be - in showing the huge gap between the over-the-top, in-the-moment practicality of Scarlett and the immaterial dreams of yesterday held so tightly by Old Southerners like Ashley, Melanie, and the rest, Mitchell tells us that both ways of thinking have their benefits and faults. It's not good to hold on to the past without moving forward, but only worrying about current physical security without holding tight to family and identity will cause pain and loneliness in the future. The messages are many in GWTW, and none of the 1000+ pages are superfluous. It was a pleasure to read, to laugh at the witty dialogue, sigh with sadness or nostalgia, scoff with annoyance at characters' actions, and feel the pain of the bitter ironies that define the lives of characters like Scarlett and Rhett.GWTW is not just a love story to me; it's so much more than that. It makes you think about what's past, but warns you not to dwell on the memories. Also, issues about war, race, and gender are definitely touched upon, oftentimes subtly, and it makes for great analysis. I can see why this novel won the Pulitzer Prize. Many issues are laid out all at once in front of you, forcing you to acknowledge their presence, whether it's painful to do so or not. "Gone With the Wind" made it to my "favorite books" list by page 150. It's an amazing literary work; a real masterpiece.