'A Shout In The Ruins' Probes The Lasting Infections Of War And Slavery
Kevin Powers' bleak, stunning new book is set in both the 1950s and the Civil War era. It's an intricately plotted look at the ways violence can shape a nation in ways that may not be recoverable.
Towards the end of Kevin Powers' second novel, , a young man wandering the country in the days of the Civil War comes across a boy his own age dressed in a Confederate uniform. The stranger, in a paranoid fit of rage, slashes the boy's neck and shoots and kills his dog. The stunned boy wraps his pet's corpse in a Union blanket, and comes to a sad realization: "The simple fact was this: it was hard to find a
