Publishers Weekly
For their third collaboration, two-time Academy Award-winner Hackman and Lenihan (Justice for None) competently mine Civil War lore to dramatize a prison escape. Southwest Georgia's Andersonville, aka Fort Sumter, was as bad a Confederate POW stockade as the gut-wrenching descriptions here ("an Old Testament nightmare") attest. Union Capt. Nathan Parker, commanding the Michigan 5th (aka Parker's Rangers, famed as a mounted infantry unit), is captured along with 23 of his men outside Washington, D.C., during Jubal Early's July 1864 Confederate raid. Two months later, Nathan breaks out, vowing to return and save his soldiers. Between the violent clashes undertaken with his hired guns, Nathan copes by reciting Thoreau and fondly recalling his lover, Darien Crosby. He presses his noble if not reckless mission despite his raiders' slippery loyalties, and the result is a rousing take on familiar territory. (May)
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Library Journal
Nathan Parker is a Union officer who escapes from the notorious Confederate prison at Andersonville with the obsessive goal of returning to rescue his comrades. Sadly, the book's noble premise and great start do not pan out in this third novel (after Justice for None and Wake of the Perdido Star) by Academy Award-winning actor Hackman and underwater archaeologist coauthor Lenihan. When Parker first reaches Union lines, he is unable to convince his higher-ups, including Ulysses S. Grant, of the need to rescue the prisoners. So he leads his own rescue mission, assisted by former Confederate Marcel LaFarge and a band of cutthroats whose motives are never clearly defined. Escape is not so much about the miseries at Andersonville as it is about Parker's escape, his trek through the dying Confederacy, and his quest to free his fellow soldiers. Although it does have its moments, the book is choppily written, confusing, sometimes contradictory, and includes a highly unlikely encounter with a lost love and irrelevant sex with a demented widow. MacKinlay Kantor's Pulitzer Prize-winning Andersonville remains the gold standard on the topic. For larger collections.
—Robert Conroy
NOVEMBER 2008 - AudioFile
A Yankee captain escapes from Andersonville, the notorious Civil War prison in Georgia, and returns with a gang of ruffians to rescue his starving men. The novel by the Academy Award-winning Hackman and coauthor Lenihan is a rich, detailed evocation of the final year of that terrible war and is filled with suspense and colorful characters. Narrator Christopher Lane has a gift for portraying the many types of people caught up in the chaos of the times, and he has a good command of Northern and Southern regional speech patterns and accents. The story is well researched, thrilling, and well narrated. A haunting listening experience. D.L.G. © AudioFile 2008, Portland, Maine
