Hi, Pam -- Thanks so much for your nice note! I will read COLD MOUNTAIN. I know already that it does not end as it did in the movie -- I thought the movie ending was dramatically unsound and a great example of moviemakers jerking the audience around.

I, too, have grown up with the fairy tale perspective toward the South (our ancestors were Union, but my father was never partisan in his reading of history and what he taught me). I started reading GONE WITH THE WIND when I was about 13 years old. I read it again and again (I stopped counting the number of times when I reached 30!) It has perhaps become too much a Bible to me of the South and the War. So COLD MOUNTAIN is just what I need.

I have a book of Margaret Mitchell's letters. Let me tell you one of the funny stories that comes from the letters. Apparently as a child she would sit on the front porch of her family home in Atlanta night after night in warm weather, and listen to the grown-ups talk about the War. And one day, when she was about 9 or 10, she came home from school sobbing hysterically. Her mother asked her why she was crying, and she replied that one of her classmates had told her that the South had lost the War. Her mother said, "Why, yes, dear Didn't you know that?" The young Margaret Mitchell had gotten the impression, from listening to the grown-ups all those nights on the porch, that the South had, in fact, won! I don't know whether it's a true story, but I always found it charming.

Thanks again for writing.

Christiana