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The Wettest County in the World: A Novel Based on a True Story, by Matt Bondurant
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Based on the true story of Matt Bondurant’s grandfather and two granduncles, The Wettest County in the World is a gripping tale of brotherhood, greed, and murder. The Bondurant Boys were a notorious gang of roughnecks and moonshiners who ran liquor through Franklin County, Virginia, during Prohibition and in the years after. Howard, the eldest brother, is an ox of a man besieged by the horrors he witnessed in the Great War; Forrest, the middle brother, is fierce, mythically indestructible, and the consummate businessman; and Jack, the youngest, has a taste for luxury and a dream to get out of Franklin. Driven and haunted, these men forge a business, fall in love, and struggle to stay afloat as they watch their family die, their father's business fail, and the world they know crumble beneath the Depression and drought.
White mule, white lightning, firewater, popskull, wild cat, stump whiskey, or rotgut—whatever you called it, Franklin County was awash in moonshine in the 1920s. When Sherwood Anderson, the journalist and author of Winesburg, Ohio, was covering a story there, he christened it the “wettest county in the world.” In the twilight of his career, Anderson finds himself driving along dusty red roads trying to find the Bondurant brothers, piece together the clues linking them to “The Great Franklin County Moonshine Conspiracy,” and break open the silence that shrouds Franklin County.
In vivid, muscular prose, Matt Bondurant brings these men—their dark deeds, their long silences, their deep desires—to life. His understanding of the passion, violence, and desperation at the center of this world is both heartbreaking and magnificent.
- Sales Rank: #60673 in Books
- Published on: 2009-12-29
- Released on: 2009-12-29
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: 8.44" h x .90" w x 5.50" l,
- Binding: Paperback
- 312 pages
- ISBN13: 9781416561408
- Condition: Used - Very Good
- Notes: 100% Satisfaction Guarantee. Tracking provided on most orders. Buy with Confidence! Millions of books sold!
From Publishers Weekly
Starred Review. This fictionalized tale of Depression-era bootlegging from Bondurant (The Third Translation) enlists the help of Winesburg, Ohio author Sherwood Anderson to investigate Bondurant family lore. In 1928, a pair of thieves accost Bondurant's real life great-uncle Forrest at his Franklin County, Va., restaurant. They're after a large cache of bootlegging money and end up cutting Forrest's throat. The story of his survival and his trek to a hospital 12 miles away has taken on mythical proportions by the time Sherwood Anderson arrives in Franklin County in 1934 to research a magazine piece on the area's prolific moonshiners. Soon after Anderson's arrival, two anonymous men appear at the same hospital, one with legs meticulously shattered from ankle to hip, the other one castrated, with the by-products of the deed deposited in a jar of moonshine. The arc of the story lies between the attack on Forrest and that on the two men. Bondurant endows his gritty story with all the puzzle-solving satisfactions of a mystery. It's a gripping, relentless tale, delivered in no-nonsense prose. (Oct.) ""
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved."
From Booklist
This family saga follows the Bondurants, bootlegging brothers runnin’ stills, runnin’ loads, and runnin’ from the law in Depression-era Virginia. The book is mainly narrated through the experience of the youngest Bondurant, Jack (in truth, a grandfather of the author), and his family’s moonshine enterprise supplies the action in a plot that evokes the culture of distilling and distributing white lightning. To optimistic Jack, bootlegging is both a bond to his older brothers, Forrest and Howard, and a means to make cash to impress a girl. Forrest, by contrast, is taciturn and suspicious: the world is violent, and he meets it on that ground. Tender of the stills and imbiber from same, burly Howard is always ready to take on the Bondurants’ enemies, corrupt law officers. Wending through this conflict in flash-forward mode is novelist Sherwood Anderson, who plumbs the Bondurant story a few years after the brothers’ climactic confrontation with the county sheriff. Descriptively gritty and emotionally resonant, novelist Bondurant dramatically projects the poverty and danger at the heart of the old-time bootlegging life. --Gilbert Taylor
Review
"Bondurant tells a distinctively American story. The gritty, suspenseful narrative gripped me and wouldn't let me go. It also touched my heart in all the right ways. Matt Bondurant's writing is as full of beauty as it is of verve and grit. Thank God it's legal to write so well." -- Lee Martin, author of River of Heaven and The Bright Forever
"In his scintillating new novel, Matt Bondurant explores a crucial period in the history of Virginia and of his family. His gorgeous, precise prose brings to life an amazing cast of characters, including Sherwood Anderson, and the often deadly battles of Prohibition. The Wettest County in the World is a remarkably compelling, highly intelligent, and deeply moving novel." -- Margot Livesey, author of The House on Fortune Street and Eva Moves the Furniture
"Bondurant endows this gritty story with all the puzzle-solving satisfactions of a mystery. It's a gripping, relentless tale, delivered in no-nonsense prose." -- Publishers Weekly (starred review)
"Interweaving the bleak portraits of Walker Evans, the charged landscapes of Annie Dillard, and the breakneck plotting of Cormac McCarthy, Matt Bondurant mines his own family history to offer a novel that's both a gritty, fast-paced tale of bootleggers and car chases and a timeless hard-knock ballad, a myth fixed in the amber of one small community's imagination. The Wettest County in the World is a suspense story dashed to tintype smithereens, each one a jewel." -- Elis Avery, author of The Teahouse Fire
"Brilliantly conceived, and so close to home, this novel proves Matt Bondurant's burgeoning talent -- a book for thirsty American readers to guzzle down, a book for all young American writers to admire." -- Alan Cheuse, author of The Fires
"Bondurant writes fiercely and passionately. Severe violence, thrillingly rendered, pervades this book, which will remind readers of hard-hitting Southern writers such as Cormac McCarthy and Larry Brown. ....The story Bondurant has to tell is riveting, detailed and historical. His knowledge of Southern culture is as deep as his ancestors' knowledge of making whiskey. We are aware from the first page that we are in the hands of a remarkable storyteller." -- San Francisco Chronicle
"Bondurant is a nimble writer, especially when it comes to depicting gore and guts. His descriptions of the warped and wounded (a man lying in a hospital bed with "skin blanched like boiled meat; the bedding stained with a yellowish fluid" can leave a reader queasy, but the liveliness of his writing makes it hard for even the most lily-livered to look away.....Bondurant's prose is lyrical.......who can deny the power of a narrative so deeply rooted in childhood imaginings, when a mild and quiet grandfather hung those brass knuckles on the wall?" -- New York Times Book Review
Most helpful customer reviews
72 of 80 people found the following review helpful.
Enticing, Graphic, Americana, and Utterly Brilliant
By Burgmicester
I am a sucker for good historic fiction and this is an excellent slice of Americana from the red clay dirt of Virginia: Franklin County, to be exact. The story starts in 1918 with the introduction of the Bondurant family and the trials of the day - the great influenza epidemic. From there the story jumps to 1934 (current timeframe) and then to and from 1928 as it brings the background into the story. This is done very nicely and the story is brought together from several angles using the real life reporter/writer - Sherwood Anderson (author of Winesburg, Ohio - now available from the Guttenberg Project public domain), as way to tell the story from the present tense. Anderson mentions that he has had run-ins with Hemmingway and Billy Faulkner - and as I read this story, I couldn't help but to see Bondurant's attempt at a similar style to Faulkner, but with an updated and more modern flair. The characterizations are rich and peeled back like an onion to reveal layer after layer of the main characters' history and development. The author also uses a technique that I haven't seen - there are no quotations to delineate the verbalizations between characters. Not unlike some of the masters of the past, Bondurant has established a writing persona - i.e. Faulkner's use of not identifying the character and making the reader use their own identification through the conversation.
Matt Bondurant calls this a work of fiction based on fact from his family's legend - thereby giving the reader a glimpse into the Bondurant family tree. The time frame are the years just before prohibition has been extinguished, and the moonshine business is in full swing in Franklin County with the Bondurant brothers thick in it. There is a little of everything in this book and the author concisely tells the tale in about 300 pages. But the story is not just told to the reader, it is described in terrific detail with sometimes graphic and sometimes beautiful prose. As you are grabbed by the story, it is nearly impossible to put down this book.
The author has researched his subject material very well indeed. His depiction of this era is superb and the wording paints the mural so well the reader is visualizing the entire surroundings. You are in Franklin County and watching the events, not reading them. This is a brilliant work and well worth the time to read it - and it won't take you long, as I just couldn't stop until it was finished.
This is a slice of time in America that we can only read about and Matt Bondurant is able to give us this period of time and allows us to leave our current life and live within this one. Often people will ask why I read so many books, and I'll say that with a good book, I can be transported into the story, into a time that I never saw, or into a place that I'll never visit; this is one of those books. This not just a good book; I rarely give out 5 stars, but Matt Bondurant has earned all five of them with this potential classic.
65 of 75 people found the following review helpful.
Great Material, Not So Great Presentation
By Aderyn
During Prohibition and beyond, Forrest, Howard, and Jack Bondurant (the author's great-uncles and grandfather) decided that one way to keep their families going through the worldwide Spanish flu epidemic, Prohibition, the Great Depression, and a crippling drought was to found a moonshine dynasty. The infamous Bondurant brothers were major bootleggers in Franklin County, Virginia, which Sherwood Anderson, covering a story there, called "the wettest county in the world."
Although the material that Bondurant has to work with reflects a fascinating period in America's history, I found his presentation of it somewhat dry (no pun intended!) and often confusing. He chooses to use a straightforward prose style that minimizes punctuation; for example, quotation marks are eliminated altogether and commas nearly so. This style can be intrusive even in the best writers' hands (Cormac McCarthy comes to mind). There is, after all, good reason why punctuation was standardized to begin with: Remember your primary teachers telling you that it is meant to help the reader? It's true, for this reader at least.
Also, the novel jumps around in time, from 1918 to 1934 to 1928 to 1929 and again to 1934, back to 1919 then to 1930, and so on. To a limited extent, this approach helps pique the reader's interest, as when, for instance, we meet two of the Bondurants' competitors in the hospital, appallingly mutilated, while in the reader's mind the Bondurants are still just simple farming folk. Because the timeframe moves so frequently and randomly, though, the reader finds himself often disoriented and struggling to piece together the story. I repeatedly had to flip back to check what year it was and work out whether some earlier event was part of the foundation for what was happening now or whether it hadn't occurred yet.
Sherwood Anderson serves as a sort-of narrator, staying in Franklin County to do research to write about what was happening there. For the most part, this helps the novel, bringing to it an unenlightened point of view that parallels the reader's own. However, the frequent references to Anderson's testy relationship with other authors of his time, the building of his new house, and other details of his life outside of Franklin County add needless minutiae for the reader to sort through and allocate to their places in the story; ultimately, they have none, and seem to be mostly just an English major showing off.
I had a difficult time getting to know and care about the book's characters, at least partly because of the effort it took just to follow their stories. It wasn't until nearly the end of the book that it began to matter to me how any of it turned out. One of the parts I liked best was the brief author's note at the end, because by then I finally knew everyone and was interested in what had become of them. I wish the author had made this happen much earlier.
28 of 33 people found the following review helpful.
Death in the Afternoon
By Best Of All
To dismiss the infamous Bondurant brothers as simply country bootleggers would be selling them short....and risking your life.
They had carved a nice living as moonshiners in Franklin County, Virginia, but that is not even half of the story. Each played a role in the criminal success story due to very unique personalities; Jack was always angling to strike it rich through a big score, Howard was a haunted veteran of World War I who enjoyed drinking the hard stuff as much as marketing it and Forrest was a tough as they came - he had a deep neck scar to prove it - once walking nearly 12 miles in the snow to receive medical assistance for a slit throat.
But when the trio refuses to pay "security" money to police, it leads to an even more wild ride in the turf wars where only the strongest could survive to fight another day, where the battles during the waning years of the Great Depression included shootings, knifings, beatings, shakedowns and brutal types of revenge that were fates worse than death for men.
Author Matt Bondurant chronicles these turbulent times of his grandfather and two granduncles in this novel that is based on the true story of their lives and the ripping apart of the veil that covered the lawlessness through a 1935 conspiracy trial which took down many players, but found journalist Sherwood Anderson chasing the shadows of the brothers to get to the heart of the story while attempting to break the county code of silence found within this vicious game.
Through dialogue and gripping scenes that are not for the faint of heart, Matt Bondurant brings to life an era where big city gangsters may have captured the national headlines, but these rural areas packed a gangland cruelty that was especially brutal. And that Matt Bondurant is talking about family makes this story even more compelling.
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