THE AMALGAMATION POLKA
by Stephen Wright

Amazing book.  I would suggest you buy a copy immediately.  I picked up a not-for-sale review copy for two bucks at a used bookstore in the back of a bodybuilding gym in Key West.

Stephen Wright is a common name.  There's a great comedian named Stephen Wright, and a great figurative painter of the same name.  There's also an author, and he, like the other two Stephen Wrights, is among the very best in his field.  You may want to consider changing your name to Stephen Wright, too.

I read some reviews of this book, and it sounded like a bore--- but then, anything having to do with the Civil War generally turns me off, except Walt Whitman.  All those blank-faced soldiers and melancholy drum rolls-- I'd rather be ...

But THE AMALGAMATION POLKA does for the Civil War what Gravity's Rainbow did for World War II-- it shows how the Civil War is still going on, right now, inside your very head, in the words that you use, in the dilemmas that you are usually able to ignore.

The book's plot succeeds as it follows a young man named Liberty Fish from birth to coming-of-age on a trek across the United States as a child, a landlbber pirate, a soldier and then a deserter.  But the major accomplishment here is the prose.  Wright brings to life the colorful language of the time and plays it like a master.  Phrase after phrase delights; forgotten slang sings again; and the book is jam packed with hilarious turns of phrase, proverbs, maxims, epithets and other expressions.

One example: when Liberty's mad-genius grandfather speaks of the suicide of one of his slaves, at the end of a rather convoluted statement, here is his euphenism for "died":  "...perhaps she wouldn't have joined the majority."

 --C. B. Coble