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Neel K Shah
If you don't know much about nature and have never ventured beyond your backyard, this book will fulfill your senses of what they have been deprived. You will grab the next chance to trek to the nearest wooded area to explore and share with Inman and the characters in Cold Mountain the wonders and the magic in nature. If you are already an outdoors-lover, you will appreciate Frazier's writing even more. Every person in this novel, and you will meet many, has a story, sometimes interesting, sometimes sad, but each gives you a look into the life of someone or something otherwise foreign to you. The many people Inman meets and the experiences he goes through lend a deeper insight into what he is made of and show how he grows as he makes the passage back home, back to Cold Mountain.
John
It blows. don't bother reading it. I was force to read it.
Elizabeth Morgan
I listened to Cold Mountain as a 'talking book at Christmas on a trip from Canberra (our national capital) to Adelaide and Melbourne, a journey which takes around 21 hours in total. I was so captivated by the eloquence of Frazier's lyrical prose, that the fourteen and a half hours of the unabridged version made the journey one of the shortest I've ever done. I drive this road annually and will remember this trip through Inman's and Ada's stories. I found myself deeply moved by Frazier's story telling end the, epic walk. Frazier's willingness to expose Inman's and Ada's vulnerabilities, alongside their enormous courage, is rare writing for a man. His is the style of Pat Barker trilogy of the futility and tragedy of war from the eyes and hearts of ordinary men and women who get caught up in someone else's war.
I loved the detail of their thoughts, the landscape, the characters, the events which they all encountered, the realness of the way in which Frazier recounted what might have been. Frazier reads this story with a beautiful timbre and by the end of the tapes we were convinced that Inman and Ada had been talking to us.
4 stars and one of the most beautiful books I've read for a couple of years.
Peggy Sterkin
Hello, I finished this book in Arizona, the last place I visited before I returned to Australia. It has wreaked me. I can't read much else, and I keep wondering why this book was so different. The author tells the story, as authors often do, but he lets the reader respond. There is no manipulation of the reader. You read the story, and there aren't bad guys and good guys, and the people in his story make themselves known to the reader as time passes. I can read crime fiction on the airplane to Sydney, where I occasionally work, and in the hotel room, and on the trip coming back. But everytime I pick up a book in a shop and read the first page, or another page , I can see the writer's craft, and some books are well crafted, that is true. I just can't bear the language of the well crafted writer, the clever and expressive use of words that leave me out, or tell me how to feel, or who to care about. I can read William Thackery, because he knows the good and the bad in his people and he lets me know what they have been up to. But I can't read much else at the moment except for children's books - The Phantom Tollbooth is one I always read -- because a perfect children's book is probably the best thing anyone can read. Phantom is a perfect book, and I feel that way about Cold Mountain. Cheers, Peggy
John Baker
This is not a book to be read on a bus or on a subway. This is a work that demands time and attention. It will reward the attentive reader with a richness of imagery and lyrical description that is rare indeed in a modern narrative. This immensely detailed work is deeply evocative - calling forth primitive almost atavistic connections to the natural world that I, for one, did not think were still available to me.
Austin Wilson
Cold Mountain is a very good book. The first part of the book is not very good but as you get the the forth or fifth chapters it starts to get interesting.
