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Band of Angels
Amantha Starr, born and raised by a doting father on a Kentucky plantation in the years before the Civil War, is the heroine of this powerfully dramatic novel. At her father's death Amantha learns that her mother was a slave and that she, too, is to be sold into servitude. What follows is a vast panorama of one of the most turbulent periods of American History as seen through the eyes of star-crossed young woman. Amantha soon finds herself in New Orleans, where she spends the war years with Hamish Bond, a slave trader. At war’s end, she marries Tobias Sears, a Union officer and Emersonian idealist. Despite sporadic periods of contentment, Amantha finds life with Tobias trying, and she is haunted still by her tangled past. “Oh, who am I?” she asks at the beginning of the novel. Only after many years, after achieving a hard-won wisdom and maturity, does she begin to understand that question.
Band of Angels puts on ready display Robert Penn Warren’s prodigious gifts. First published in 1955, it is one of the most searing and vivid fictional accounts of the Civil War era ever written.
Band of Angels puts on ready display Robert Penn Warren’s prodigious gifts. First published in 1955, it is one of the most searing and vivid fictional accounts of the Civil War era ever written.
392 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1955
13 people are currently reading
653 people want to read
About the author
Robert Penn Warren
336 books998 followersRobert Penn Warren was an American poet, novelist, and literary critic and was one of the founders of New Criticism. He was also a charter member of the Fellowship of Southern Writers. He founded the literary journal The Southern Review with Cleanth Brooks in 1935. He received the 1947 Pulitzer Prize for the Novel for All the King's Men (1946) and the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1958 and 1979. He is the only person to have won Pulitzer Prizes for both fiction and poetry.
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July 23, 2024
REREAD
"Oh, who am I? For so long that was, you might say, the cry of my heart. There were times when I would say to myself my own name – my name is Amantha Starr – over and over again, trying, somehow, to make myself come true …."
******
What Amantha (nicknamed Manty) learns at age sixteen is that she isn’t who she thought she was. It was then that she discovered that her mother who died while giving birth to her was a slave – and, legally, so was she.
Her father, a Kentucky plantation owner, had hid the fact from her and had never signed papers to free her because he was hoping she would never know. But when she was sixteen her father died and because he was deeply in debt at the time his creditor gained control of her father’s property which included his slaves – and she was counted among them.
The story begins in the years just before the Civil War and continues through that conflict, Reconstruction, and afterwards. It is a period of not only national turmoil, but a time in which Amatha’s troubled life is filled with chaos in which she searches for truth, freedom, and, most of all, a sense of identity (‘Oh, who am I?’)
The story is told entirely through the first person narration of Amantha, beginning with a description of her privileged childhood that was taken away from her upon her father’s death. It was then that she was sold down the river to New Orleans, which is where the story is primarily set.
******
MS. PARK AND ME – AND BAND OF ANGELS.
Freda Park, my high school English teacher, seemed to have been overly protective of our immaturity when it involved our reading experiences. On the other hand, I was overly protective of her knowing what I read in my leisure – especially after she confiscated my copy of Erskine Caldwell’s God’s Little Acre.
I know Ms Park frowned upon Robert Penn Warren, a writer I had never heard of at the time, for she cautioned us that he was the kind of writer that we should avoid. I don’t recall the exact circumstances as to why his name was mentioned in the class but I remember her saying that his novel, Band of Angels, was “not a nice book.”
I may have been daydreaming or gazing out the window or both, but her mention of a book that was not nice grabbed my attention. Unfortunately, that’s all she said about the book and no student, including me, asked her why she didn’t think it was a nice book.
That day, however, was the beginning of my hunt for Band of Angels. Of course, it wasn’t in our school library and I knew it wasn’t in the county library (‘because it was not a nice book’), and anyway I didn’t have access to that library since it was twenty-five miles from my home and might as well have been a hundred.
I eventually located a copy in my college library. After reading it I was fairly certain that I knew why Ms. Park objected to the book. It might have partly been due to the relationship between a beautiful young mulatto slave woman and her white master, but I think it was more than that.
Penn Warren liberally – more than liberally – sprinkled the N-word throughout the book. This is what I think made the book objectionable to Ms. Park.
Of course there is no way he could have avoided the word since the book is mostly set in the Deep South during the Civil War era. But even I think he overdid it. The book is a little over three hundred pages long and the word made at least that many appearances in the book.
You know, I still wonder to this day if she read the entire book.
"Oh, who am I? For so long that was, you might say, the cry of my heart. There were times when I would say to myself my own name – my name is Amantha Starr – over and over again, trying, somehow, to make myself come true …."
******
What Amantha (nicknamed Manty) learns at age sixteen is that she isn’t who she thought she was. It was then that she discovered that her mother who died while giving birth to her was a slave – and, legally, so was she.
Her father, a Kentucky plantation owner, had hid the fact from her and had never signed papers to free her because he was hoping she would never know. But when she was sixteen her father died and because he was deeply in debt at the time his creditor gained control of her father’s property which included his slaves – and she was counted among them.
The story begins in the years just before the Civil War and continues through that conflict, Reconstruction, and afterwards. It is a period of not only national turmoil, but a time in which Amatha’s troubled life is filled with chaos in which she searches for truth, freedom, and, most of all, a sense of identity (‘Oh, who am I?’)
The story is told entirely through the first person narration of Amantha, beginning with a description of her privileged childhood that was taken away from her upon her father’s death. It was then that she was sold down the river to New Orleans, which is where the story is primarily set.
******
MS. PARK AND ME – AND BAND OF ANGELS.
Freda Park, my high school English teacher, seemed to have been overly protective of our immaturity when it involved our reading experiences. On the other hand, I was overly protective of her knowing what I read in my leisure – especially after she confiscated my copy of Erskine Caldwell’s God’s Little Acre.
I know Ms Park frowned upon Robert Penn Warren, a writer I had never heard of at the time, for she cautioned us that he was the kind of writer that we should avoid. I don’t recall the exact circumstances as to why his name was mentioned in the class but I remember her saying that his novel, Band of Angels, was “not a nice book.”
I may have been daydreaming or gazing out the window or both, but her mention of a book that was not nice grabbed my attention. Unfortunately, that’s all she said about the book and no student, including me, asked her why she didn’t think it was a nice book.
That day, however, was the beginning of my hunt for Band of Angels. Of course, it wasn’t in our school library and I knew it wasn’t in the county library (‘because it was not a nice book’), and anyway I didn’t have access to that library since it was twenty-five miles from my home and might as well have been a hundred.
I eventually located a copy in my college library. After reading it I was fairly certain that I knew why Ms. Park objected to the book. It might have partly been due to the relationship between a beautiful young mulatto slave woman and her white master, but I think it was more than that.
Penn Warren liberally – more than liberally – sprinkled the N-word throughout the book. This is what I think made the book objectionable to Ms. Park.
Of course there is no way he could have avoided the word since the book is mostly set in the Deep South during the Civil War era. But even I think he overdid it. The book is a little over three hundred pages long and the word made at least that many appearances in the book.
You know, I still wonder to this day if she read the entire book.
October 11, 2020
This is a sweeping novel that hits all the right cylinders for me. A truly great story, covering the life of an interesting woman. Warren may be my all-time favorite southern writer, he seems to have that special, undeniable understanding of what he writes. How else could he know all this history, all the peculiar idioms and, most impressively, pierce the psyche of a people? I pulled this off my shelf because it felt like the time to read another RPW (I so loved some of his other works, I deigned long ago to consume his entire repertoire). As it turns out it was another set in the Civil War (the subject of my last book) – told from a southerner, but orders of magnitude deeper and authentic than that other classic, Gone with the Wind (which I abandoned in a fit of protestant guilt as a teenager, after the fears of hellfire pierced my fragile mind). So, it is not fair to compare this one to one I did not actually finish – but I can’t imagine anything comparing to Band of Angels, it was that stunningly powerful for me.
This is the best of the year, perhaps many years, that I have read. I finally found an authentic account of how the slave trade worked, on Africa’s coast (it hearkens Conrad). It covers the period just before the civil war, in Kentucky, goes to Ohio, down to New Orleans during its occupation early in the war and during reconstruction. The 1866 riots in New Orleans (they had the audacity to try to give freed slaves the right to vote, it ended in failure and violently). And, finally, it ends on the plains of small-town Kansas, where I grew up. Having lived also in Kentucky, where the author hails from (poet laureate, one of its finest), and spent time over the river in Ohio, this was familiar territory for me. In 2020, today, the racist ideas seemingly litigated in the war between the states, seem to still persist, just under the surface. The themes in this book, the injustice, are exposed through the life of its characters. Where RPW excels in this novel copyrighted in 1955, is through the inner lives of a panoply of characters in all walks of life: Ex-slave trader, freed slaves with seething resentment, poor beaten down slaves, those hiding their drop of color, abolitionists, apologists, businessmen, philanderers, shysters, zealots, etc.
My family has always had a fascination with the civil war (my brother is our buff), and we took vacations to Gettysburg PA (we even have a musket on the wall). Reading this book at this time, when it seems the US could fracture again, made it especially poignant. The same old justifications for superiority seem to never leave us, not our best human trait, so easily exploited for political purposes.
The main character, our protagonist, is a girl who plays on her mother’s grave as a girl and with the black “servants” around the house. Starting the book from our girl (Amantha Starr, or“Manty”) is clever, as she slowly pieces the story together – although white, her beloved father’s wife was not her mother somehow and died child-less. The author deftly drops bread crumbs, building delightful tensions our sweet girl discovers through hard lessons what this means to be black in America just before the civil war, even though she is very fair complected and can disguise her breeding. Enjoying the cover of the daughter of a kindly slave owner, she is puzzled by the fiery abolitionist fervor in Oberlin college, amongst white folks. It comes crashing down when her father dies, and she is suddenly sold, along with the homestead, into the slave trade. After harrowing experience, she is acquired by Hamish Bond, an older man who ultimately uses her as her concubine. He confesses ultimately to her his dark past, as a trader who sailed to the ivory coast and found prisons full of captured men to purchase in the thriving trade. It was interesting to me that it was the rivalry between clans, who raided and captured in bloodthirsty fashion other tribes to supply the worldwide demand in exchange for western goods. One of the freed slaves on Hamish’ plantation upriver from New Orleans, is Ra Rau, taken as a baby and raised and taught by Hamish. As a free man, he manages the plantation, and is a powerful figure, blue-black and beautiful in his strength and fine manners and dress. He figures to be key character going forward. Eventually Hamish loses everything in the war and gives Manty her freedom. Through her beauty, fine manners and apparent white-ness, she marries a young Union officer, Tobias. He is an interesting character, having commended black troops effectively in the civil war and, as it turns out, is a close friend to Ra Rau who escaped from Hamish after an altercation, and has changed to a traditional name (Oliver Cromwell Jones). Knowing her secrets, having shared a past, the relationship between Manty and Jones is complex – he resenting her ease of life as he struggles in the brutal post-war period where an ex-slave’s life was always in peril as the locals tried to re-establish the south under the policing of the federal. Tobias is sympathetic to black suffrage, and is nearly killed in the New Orleans riot of 1866 when the convention tried and failed to give suffrage to blacks.
Manty just can’t find love, always feeling betrayed by her father, then her husband, as he has affairs and falls to drink in despair watching his cronies profit from the post-war bounty of the south (carpetbaggers). Tobias is disowned by his family for his book critical of the US for its lust for commercial ventures instead of following through to provide the hard-won liberty of blacks. He loses his friends, too, and Manty serves him through it all, even when the marriage is essentially dead. She endures a life of deprivation, but in the end finds reconciliation even when carrying the burden of her secrets through it all. The last chapter was beautiful.
This is the story of a life, with excellent characters seeking altruistic and selfish aims, in a most interesting period of our nation’s history. I always learn more about what this period was about when I read Warren. He understands the curse our nation invited with slavery like none other. This is a case where the novel tells history and provides color and intimate details of the dark stain on the psyche that slavery produces. This battle continues, we can see it today, and Warren’s brilliant book brings it to tragic life like none I’ve encountered. I will read all his other work (just checked and it was 1994 when I read the RPW reader, a brilliant series of stories and essays that stick with me to this day and informed my point of view on the special condition of being black in America). It does not surprise me that many generations later it is still with us. Warren’s mental ruminations in Manty’s head is excessive sometimes, but true to the conflict that she spent her life trying to unravel. If I could write, this is the kind of book I would write.
As it turns out, I apparently have a first edition hardback (the dust cover is a bit tattered), so this old, sweet-smelling book copyrighted in 1955 is very special to me. Now to order all the others this great author wrote.
p. 112, Manty on the restrictions of living in a particular place in time and trapped in an existential state: “You live through time, that little piece of time that is yours, but that piece of time is not only your own life, it is the summing-up of all the other lives that you are simultaneous with yours. It is, in other words, History, and what you are is an expression of History, and you do not live your life, but somehow, your life lives you, and you are, therefore, only what history does to you.”
p. 151, Hamish during his confession, explaining why he escaped a pre-ordained lifestyle as a young man to find his adventures on the high seas, and why he became a “kind” owner of slaves: “My mother had a friend with an uncle who was rich. He got me a job in the bank and I was supposed to get rich and buy a big house and a million niggers and a gilt coach and my mother would feel at home at last and I would love her devotedly. The only trouble was, I looked at the faces there and they looked at me. I knew, and they knew, that in twenty years I’d be just like them, and even if I got rich I’d be gut-shot by then.”
p. 290, this reminds me of an experience my fathers-in-law, recalled from his own upbringing on a hardscrabble small southern Kansas town. It is when Manty and Tobias lose their young son and shows the isolation this can bring to a married couple: “…perhaps Tobias felt the same thing, for I am sure that he didn’t touch a drop for some months, those months in which he and I moved in a muffled, fog-bound world, glimpsing each other now and then as the fog parted, reaching out to each other in those brief intervals of visibility, then lost again in the muffledness. But when the bank closed- we had come to Blair City to establish a little bank – Tobias began again with the whiskey. The next year we left Blair City. There was no reason to stay there, where all that remained of our boy was the hump of raw earth on the edge of the prairie, where the building Tobias had put up for his bank was having new letters in gold on the window to say it was a bank again, but not Tobias’, and where the house we had bought was not occupied by a most poisonous woman who was effusively nice to me whenever we met, and with whom I suspected Tobias of having an affair.”
p. 302, Manty becomes paranoid that old Ra Rau (Oliver Cromwell Jones) is begging on the corner of her tiny, wind-swept Kansas town, somehow having survived certain death. Then he dies, and is buried in a pauper’s grave, which she visits, all alone. Her life spins in her lonely reverie and the unquenchable desire to somehow be free and to live a normal life: “I looked down at the hump of earth. I looked across the cemetery, and saw the roofs of the town, the railroad coal-chute and water tower, yellow, needing paint. I turned my head and looked over the prairie. I thought of other towns lost on the prairie. I thought of towns beyond, towns lost back in Kentucky, Louisiana, Ohio, Massachusetts, all the places I had seen and not seen, and I was about to burst into tears as I thought of people in those places, people going about their business, doing the best they could, living and dying together, and I thought how that was the averageness I had sought, the sweet commonness of life, the waking from the nightmare. But if they were good, if they were good, I cried out, why hadn’t they set me free?”
p. 311, finally our Manty sees a black man of pride from Chicago, come to redeem his poor old father, the broken-down trash collector. Perhaps a symbol of what the future could be for herself: “I envied Mr. Lounberry, not merely because he could honor his father, but because he could honor the father who had rejected him. Yes, that was the thing to envy. With that I felt some relaxing in my soul. Maybe that could be learned, if I tried. Maybe Mr. Lounberry could teach me if I tried.”
This is the best of the year, perhaps many years, that I have read. I finally found an authentic account of how the slave trade worked, on Africa’s coast (it hearkens Conrad). It covers the period just before the civil war, in Kentucky, goes to Ohio, down to New Orleans during its occupation early in the war and during reconstruction. The 1866 riots in New Orleans (they had the audacity to try to give freed slaves the right to vote, it ended in failure and violently). And, finally, it ends on the plains of small-town Kansas, where I grew up. Having lived also in Kentucky, where the author hails from (poet laureate, one of its finest), and spent time over the river in Ohio, this was familiar territory for me. In 2020, today, the racist ideas seemingly litigated in the war between the states, seem to still persist, just under the surface. The themes in this book, the injustice, are exposed through the life of its characters. Where RPW excels in this novel copyrighted in 1955, is through the inner lives of a panoply of characters in all walks of life: Ex-slave trader, freed slaves with seething resentment, poor beaten down slaves, those hiding their drop of color, abolitionists, apologists, businessmen, philanderers, shysters, zealots, etc.
My family has always had a fascination with the civil war (my brother is our buff), and we took vacations to Gettysburg PA (we even have a musket on the wall). Reading this book at this time, when it seems the US could fracture again, made it especially poignant. The same old justifications for superiority seem to never leave us, not our best human trait, so easily exploited for political purposes.
The main character, our protagonist, is a girl who plays on her mother’s grave as a girl and with the black “servants” around the house. Starting the book from our girl (Amantha Starr, or“Manty”) is clever, as she slowly pieces the story together – although white, her beloved father’s wife was not her mother somehow and died child-less. The author deftly drops bread crumbs, building delightful tensions our sweet girl discovers through hard lessons what this means to be black in America just before the civil war, even though she is very fair complected and can disguise her breeding. Enjoying the cover of the daughter of a kindly slave owner, she is puzzled by the fiery abolitionist fervor in Oberlin college, amongst white folks. It comes crashing down when her father dies, and she is suddenly sold, along with the homestead, into the slave trade. After harrowing experience, she is acquired by Hamish Bond, an older man who ultimately uses her as her concubine. He confesses ultimately to her his dark past, as a trader who sailed to the ivory coast and found prisons full of captured men to purchase in the thriving trade. It was interesting to me that it was the rivalry between clans, who raided and captured in bloodthirsty fashion other tribes to supply the worldwide demand in exchange for western goods. One of the freed slaves on Hamish’ plantation upriver from New Orleans, is Ra Rau, taken as a baby and raised and taught by Hamish. As a free man, he manages the plantation, and is a powerful figure, blue-black and beautiful in his strength and fine manners and dress. He figures to be key character going forward. Eventually Hamish loses everything in the war and gives Manty her freedom. Through her beauty, fine manners and apparent white-ness, she marries a young Union officer, Tobias. He is an interesting character, having commended black troops effectively in the civil war and, as it turns out, is a close friend to Ra Rau who escaped from Hamish after an altercation, and has changed to a traditional name (Oliver Cromwell Jones). Knowing her secrets, having shared a past, the relationship between Manty and Jones is complex – he resenting her ease of life as he struggles in the brutal post-war period where an ex-slave’s life was always in peril as the locals tried to re-establish the south under the policing of the federal. Tobias is sympathetic to black suffrage, and is nearly killed in the New Orleans riot of 1866 when the convention tried and failed to give suffrage to blacks.
Manty just can’t find love, always feeling betrayed by her father, then her husband, as he has affairs and falls to drink in despair watching his cronies profit from the post-war bounty of the south (carpetbaggers). Tobias is disowned by his family for his book critical of the US for its lust for commercial ventures instead of following through to provide the hard-won liberty of blacks. He loses his friends, too, and Manty serves him through it all, even when the marriage is essentially dead. She endures a life of deprivation, but in the end finds reconciliation even when carrying the burden of her secrets through it all. The last chapter was beautiful.
This is the story of a life, with excellent characters seeking altruistic and selfish aims, in a most interesting period of our nation’s history. I always learn more about what this period was about when I read Warren. He understands the curse our nation invited with slavery like none other. This is a case where the novel tells history and provides color and intimate details of the dark stain on the psyche that slavery produces. This battle continues, we can see it today, and Warren’s brilliant book brings it to tragic life like none I’ve encountered. I will read all his other work (just checked and it was 1994 when I read the RPW reader, a brilliant series of stories and essays that stick with me to this day and informed my point of view on the special condition of being black in America). It does not surprise me that many generations later it is still with us. Warren’s mental ruminations in Manty’s head is excessive sometimes, but true to the conflict that she spent her life trying to unravel. If I could write, this is the kind of book I would write.
As it turns out, I apparently have a first edition hardback (the dust cover is a bit tattered), so this old, sweet-smelling book copyrighted in 1955 is very special to me. Now to order all the others this great author wrote.
p. 112, Manty on the restrictions of living in a particular place in time and trapped in an existential state: “You live through time, that little piece of time that is yours, but that piece of time is not only your own life, it is the summing-up of all the other lives that you are simultaneous with yours. It is, in other words, History, and what you are is an expression of History, and you do not live your life, but somehow, your life lives you, and you are, therefore, only what history does to you.”
p. 151, Hamish during his confession, explaining why he escaped a pre-ordained lifestyle as a young man to find his adventures on the high seas, and why he became a “kind” owner of slaves: “My mother had a friend with an uncle who was rich. He got me a job in the bank and I was supposed to get rich and buy a big house and a million niggers and a gilt coach and my mother would feel at home at last and I would love her devotedly. The only trouble was, I looked at the faces there and they looked at me. I knew, and they knew, that in twenty years I’d be just like them, and even if I got rich I’d be gut-shot by then.”
p. 290, this reminds me of an experience my fathers-in-law, recalled from his own upbringing on a hardscrabble small southern Kansas town. It is when Manty and Tobias lose their young son and shows the isolation this can bring to a married couple: “…perhaps Tobias felt the same thing, for I am sure that he didn’t touch a drop for some months, those months in which he and I moved in a muffled, fog-bound world, glimpsing each other now and then as the fog parted, reaching out to each other in those brief intervals of visibility, then lost again in the muffledness. But when the bank closed- we had come to Blair City to establish a little bank – Tobias began again with the whiskey. The next year we left Blair City. There was no reason to stay there, where all that remained of our boy was the hump of raw earth on the edge of the prairie, where the building Tobias had put up for his bank was having new letters in gold on the window to say it was a bank again, but not Tobias’, and where the house we had bought was not occupied by a most poisonous woman who was effusively nice to me whenever we met, and with whom I suspected Tobias of having an affair.”
p. 302, Manty becomes paranoid that old Ra Rau (Oliver Cromwell Jones) is begging on the corner of her tiny, wind-swept Kansas town, somehow having survived certain death. Then he dies, and is buried in a pauper’s grave, which she visits, all alone. Her life spins in her lonely reverie and the unquenchable desire to somehow be free and to live a normal life: “I looked down at the hump of earth. I looked across the cemetery, and saw the roofs of the town, the railroad coal-chute and water tower, yellow, needing paint. I turned my head and looked over the prairie. I thought of other towns lost on the prairie. I thought of towns beyond, towns lost back in Kentucky, Louisiana, Ohio, Massachusetts, all the places I had seen and not seen, and I was about to burst into tears as I thought of people in those places, people going about their business, doing the best they could, living and dying together, and I thought how that was the averageness I had sought, the sweet commonness of life, the waking from the nightmare. But if they were good, if they were good, I cried out, why hadn’t they set me free?”
p. 311, finally our Manty sees a black man of pride from Chicago, come to redeem his poor old father, the broken-down trash collector. Perhaps a symbol of what the future could be for herself: “I envied Mr. Lounberry, not merely because he could honor his father, but because he could honor the father who had rejected him. Yes, that was the thing to envy. With that I felt some relaxing in my soul. Maybe that could be learned, if I tried. Maybe Mr. Lounberry could teach me if I tried.”
April 26, 2012
A book like this reminds me why I love Robert Penn Warren. He is without a doubt my favorite writer, and this book wrapped me up in its time period and beautiful wording to the point I never wanted to leave. If you want to read about the Civil War from an interesting perspective outside the battlefield, pick this up. I went in not knowing what to expect and was captivated. Warren creates a compelling story here, and his writing brings it along beautifully, and I was not disappointed. Some people are disappointed his works aren't all like "All the Kings Men," but if you look the similarities are there. You will enjoy this book if you give it a chance.
February 22, 2016
Penn Warren is remembered mostly for All the King’s Men, but Band of Angels was one of his big commercial successes and even became a colorful Hollywood epic. A beautiful movie, by the way, but which takes a lot of liberties with its source, and which does not give full justice to the author’s prose, nor to what he was trying to do. Plus, the film only retains a few elements from this dense book: a more faithful adaptation would have required many more hours! Band of Angels the novel disguises as a romantic southern drama of the civil War, the way Gone With the Wind or Raintree County are remembered, and as such, it works pretty well, although it may seems sometimes uneven and too long. Penn Warren, in a way, is more a thinker than a storyteller. In truth, this book is mostly a meditation about the tortured history of the South, and about what freedom truly means and can represent for a divided soul, both conceptually and practically. That idea, at the center of the book, is what makes reading it such an interesting experience. Penn Warren can be a wonderful writer, he does, notably, brings back to life the complexities of life in the South with great intelligence, although his approach to History may feel dated to some. His heroine, whose tumultuous life we follow over the course of a few tragic decades, is fascinating and remains the beating heart of the novel. She is the daughter of a plantation owner and of a slave, that is what determines her fate and her choices, it is her burden as well as her strength. She may well be one of the most underrated and intriguing characters of American literature.
June 30, 2013
Since I didn't grow up in the US, I don't know much about the actual history of the Civil War, but it looks to me that the fictional story is entwined seemlessly with some of those events and historical figures. As a period piece, it is outstanding.
I rate it 5 stars, but before the last 10 pages I was thinking 4. The whole novel is well written, by a master of the English language, let me make that clear. In American lit. few authors have equaled the greatness of Robert Penn Warren. The main problem I had in reading Band of Angels, was that the sympathy for the main character I felt in the beginning dissipates, and in the middle part I lost interest in her plight. Its historical context does remain interesting, and kept me turning the pages.
The ending wasn't just a great ending, it raised the quality of the entire novel.
I rate it 5 stars, but before the last 10 pages I was thinking 4. The whole novel is well written, by a master of the English language, let me make that clear. In American lit. few authors have equaled the greatness of Robert Penn Warren. The main problem I had in reading Band of Angels, was that the sympathy for the main character I felt in the beginning dissipates, and in the middle part I lost interest in her plight. Its historical context does remain interesting, and kept me turning the pages.
The ending wasn't just a great ending, it raised the quality of the entire novel.
December 30, 2017
Do not read this book if you are looking for a romance novel... Get one with Fabio on the cover. Do not read this book if you are a Civil War Buff... Not enough battle to get you rattled. Do not read this book if you are looking for a plot line that will reward you with heroes and villains neatly defined, or if you are unwilling or unable to believe that we are all heroes and villains in the same person at the same time.
Do not read this book if you are unwilling to think and analyze and examine yourself and others... Because that is what Robert Penn Warren excels at: scrutinizing human ideas, beliefs, and feelings.
Do not read this book if you are unwilling to think and analyze and examine yourself and others... Because that is what Robert Penn Warren excels at: scrutinizing human ideas, beliefs, and feelings.
December 27, 2010
Motherless Amantha "Manty" Starr grows up white in Kentucky in the mid-1800s. She is coddled by her father and adored by his slaves. Her father dies when she's a teen, and she discovers that her mother was a slave. Without her father to protect her, she is then sold into slavery herself in New Orleans. She has it pretty easy compared to most slaves. She marries a Union soldier she met during the Civil War and spends the next 25 years agonizing over her half-black identity. She passes for white, but blames every slight and setback on her being a "nigger." She's constantly worrying that she'll be found out, even though her husband already knows her secret. Her petulance and self-pity are out of proportion to her suffering. She never recovers from the sudden debasement after having grown up feeling superior as a white person. In truth, she's loved and accepted by both white and black communities, but she can never let herself feel like she belongs on either side of the color bar. In the end Manty understands that her continuing enslavement is a result of her perception, and only she can free herself.
It took me a long time to get through this book. The writing is solid, but the story's progress is lethargic. I stayed with it only because I found All The King's Men so compelling.
Band of Angels has value as an in-depth exploration of race and identity issues. I'm sure it had greater relevance in the South when it was published in 1955.
It took me a long time to get through this book. The writing is solid, but the story's progress is lethargic. I stayed with it only because I found All The King's Men so compelling.
Band of Angels has value as an in-depth exploration of race and identity issues. I'm sure it had greater relevance in the South when it was published in 1955.
February 7, 2021
1.5 stars. Another novel by Robert Penn Warren -- this one of the Civil War in New Orleans -- that has so many conflicting strengths and weaknesses that I find it difficult to review. Warren presents the tired old story of the “tragic mulatto,” an archetype that had been around for a century by the time Warren wrote this in the 1950s, which he somehow combines with the equally clichéd "Southern Belle in peril" narrative. Warren presents the classic parade of stereotypes: the Mammy, the cruel slave seller, the religiously-inclined Northern abolitionist, the mysterious New Orleans massa with a dark past, and the tragic mulatto herself.
Perhaps this would have been a more admirable novel if Warren had done something unique or new with these character types, or even tried to subvert them from a mid-20th century perspective, but really he just gives us Gone with the Wind, Part II, combining the Southern Belle and tragic mulatto heroines. The prose, as is so often the case with Warren, shifts between poetic and purple. For every passage of beauty and insight, there are several that wallow in cheesy romance novel tripe, where everything is repeated three times for emphasis. ("I seized him by the shoulder and began to shake him. 'I've got to know!' I cried, desperately. 'Don't you see, I've got to know? I've got to know something.'")
Even so, there were some specific details and touches, especially about the city of New Orleans, that struck me as quite authentic. As someone born and raised in the city, I found certain details to be the type that only locals with a strong sense of history would know: the use of white shells for old roads leading out to the lake; the passing reference to Tenerife (although misspelled as "Teneriffe" in both the Random House first edition and the LSU Press reprint), the main island of the Canaries that has a strong connection to Spanish New Orleans; the description of banquettes along the New Orleans streets; and the infamous terrors (perhaps exaggerated?) of General Butler's occupation of the city during the Civil War. As a New Orleans novel, it has certain merits. But that's the strongest praise I can muster.
Despite reading a melodramatic and Romantic tale of the Old South, I couldn’t stop turning pages, even with all the noteworthy flaws -- and sometimes BECAUSE of them, as I wanted to see just how schmaltzy Warren could get. If this hadn't been written by a Pulitzer Prize winner -- in fiction AND poetry, no less-- I would have tossed it aside as cheesy and clichéd. But Warren’s writing kept me just interested enough to finish this Civil War soap opera. ("Finished it, I say! Oh, I finished it!" he cried, desperately....)
Perhaps this would have been a more admirable novel if Warren had done something unique or new with these character types, or even tried to subvert them from a mid-20th century perspective, but really he just gives us Gone with the Wind, Part II, combining the Southern Belle and tragic mulatto heroines. The prose, as is so often the case with Warren, shifts between poetic and purple. For every passage of beauty and insight, there are several that wallow in cheesy romance novel tripe, where everything is repeated three times for emphasis. ("I seized him by the shoulder and began to shake him. 'I've got to know!' I cried, desperately. 'Don't you see, I've got to know? I've got to know something.'")
Even so, there were some specific details and touches, especially about the city of New Orleans, that struck me as quite authentic. As someone born and raised in the city, I found certain details to be the type that only locals with a strong sense of history would know: the use of white shells for old roads leading out to the lake; the passing reference to Tenerife (although misspelled as "Teneriffe" in both the Random House first edition and the LSU Press reprint), the main island of the Canaries that has a strong connection to Spanish New Orleans; the description of banquettes along the New Orleans streets; and the infamous terrors (perhaps exaggerated?) of General Butler's occupation of the city during the Civil War. As a New Orleans novel, it has certain merits. But that's the strongest praise I can muster.
Despite reading a melodramatic and Romantic tale of the Old South, I couldn’t stop turning pages, even with all the noteworthy flaws -- and sometimes BECAUSE of them, as I wanted to see just how schmaltzy Warren could get. If this hadn't been written by a Pulitzer Prize winner -- in fiction AND poetry, no less-- I would have tossed it aside as cheesy and clichéd. But Warren’s writing kept me just interested enough to finish this Civil War soap opera. ("Finished it, I say! Oh, I finished it!" he cried, desperately....)
April 9, 2016
"Ah, truth, I thought, it isn't enough just to be true, we have to SAY the truth to make it a living truth." So says Manty in confronting the truth of her own reality, her own identity.
Manty spends her chaotic, troubled life searching for answers about truth, about who and what she really is and especially about the possibility of being "free". In the end, she does discover the secret of who it is that can set her free.
In Amantha Starr, Warren has given us one of fiction's great personalities -- sheltered child born into love and privilege, abandoned and sold into slavery, finding her way through the chaos of the Civil War and its politically and economically brutal aftermath. Loved in turn by a slave trader, a preacher, and an idealistic soldier she was in some manner betrayed by them all.
It's a magnificently written story by a master story teller. Warren employs all of his skill and inspiration as a poet to illuminate his prose.
Manty spends her chaotic, troubled life searching for answers about truth, about who and what she really is and especially about the possibility of being "free". In the end, she does discover the secret of who it is that can set her free.
In Amantha Starr, Warren has given us one of fiction's great personalities -- sheltered child born into love and privilege, abandoned and sold into slavery, finding her way through the chaos of the Civil War and its politically and economically brutal aftermath. Loved in turn by a slave trader, a preacher, and an idealistic soldier she was in some manner betrayed by them all.
It's a magnificently written story by a master story teller. Warren employs all of his skill and inspiration as a poet to illuminate his prose.
November 12, 2016
I could be wrong, but I think one of the reasons this great piece of literature failed to survive decades onward was due to the fact that the movie starring Clark Gable was deemed a great a disappointment. People at the time expected an offering not unlike Gone With the Wind, but they got something different.
Joining Amantha Starr on her journey is a rewarding dive into rich prose and authentic history from a different point of view. Following Ms. Starr on her journey to not only freedom, but to her discovery of true identity, one cannot help but to be enamored with the color and beauty of this piece.
Joining Amantha Starr on her journey is a rewarding dive into rich prose and authentic history from a different point of view. Following Ms. Starr on her journey to not only freedom, but to her discovery of true identity, one cannot help but to be enamored with the color and beauty of this piece.
May 24, 2012
I think about writers who wrote both great poetry and great novels, and in my humble opinion there are very few. Only Hardy, Graves, and Warren comes to mind. This alone has to make RPW one of the best writers to have ever lived. Band of Angels is a good novel. It's not as good as All The Kings Men but what is?
December 15, 2017
Picked this up at my local library's used book store because I thought ALL THE KING'S MEN was such a great book. This one did not disappoint. Told in the first person with an introspective flare that makes for a slower story but very powerful.
July 26, 2024
Somehow I reached 1969 without having read Robert Penn Warren. Considering I knew the name and had read widely in American letters, the omission seemed worthy of remedy. I bought "Band Of Angels" at a used book sale. As frequently happens with BOMC titles, the dust jacket was missing. I put it on the to-be-read shelf. There it rested through moves, library re-shuffles, and decades. Until last week, when it caught my eye.
With no idea of what I was getting into, I opened the book and began to read. Before long I was at sea in 2024, beset by the same foibles, evils, lies and horrors that splatter across my screens each day. It turns out Band Of Angels is set mostly in the American South, beginning pre-Civil War and running on for a lifetime. The delusions and hardships experienced by the national community that were inflicted by slavery persist to this day. The picture Mr. Warren drew in 1954 revealed people in the North and the South, before, during, and after the War, who had no comprehension of what slavery had done to the nation. Although still in print, a one-time best seller, and the inspiration for a movie, this well-written novel by a three-time Pulitzer winner has become relatively unknown. His "All The Kings Men" has fared much better. Band of Angels is unsparing in its use of language verboten today but quite accurate for the time Like Mark Twain's great works, the ignorant but well-meaning want to ban the use of the word 'nigger', at least by white folk. Penn Warren uses it as it would be sued by his characters. He does not write sexual descriptions but is unsparing when he wants to make a point. I found it curious that in the last few pages, when some self-knowledge had been achieved, the words became less harsh.
At this writing, we are embroiled in a presidential election, probably between a popular convicted felon and the surprise candidate who used to be a criminal prosecutor. We are 70 years on from Band of Angels' first publication. Much of the post-Civil War rancor and hate discussed in the novel has been suppressed during that time. But it has been seeping, indeed bubbling, out of cauldrons of repressed hate. As proposed in "South Pacific", the magisterial Broadway musical which preceded Band of Angels by a few years (and which was still playing at the publication of the novel), racial hate has "Got to Be Carefully Taught". Without a doubt, some of the darker-skinned folk in this nation have been carefully teaching hate, but the powerful, pervasive, corrosive, and malignant brand belongs to white people, especially males. The greatest tragedy may be that so many have no real grasp of why they hate, any more than Warren's characters understand their conflicting emotions.
The story is narrated by an older woman who starts the story when she is very young. She is overwrought, given to acting without thought or understanding. The writing and the style have long been fashionable in this country, but not by any means modern. One could compare this to "Gone With the Wind", Margaret Mitchell's ridiculous whitewash of Southern gentility. Both books were made int movies, some years apart. Both movies starred Clark Gable. One had historical sense and became 'beloved'. The other flopped, even if it barely told the book's story. Therein is an American lesson.
Recommended.
With no idea of what I was getting into, I opened the book and began to read. Before long I was at sea in 2024, beset by the same foibles, evils, lies and horrors that splatter across my screens each day. It turns out Band Of Angels is set mostly in the American South, beginning pre-Civil War and running on for a lifetime. The delusions and hardships experienced by the national community that were inflicted by slavery persist to this day. The picture Mr. Warren drew in 1954 revealed people in the North and the South, before, during, and after the War, who had no comprehension of what slavery had done to the nation. Although still in print, a one-time best seller, and the inspiration for a movie, this well-written novel by a three-time Pulitzer winner has become relatively unknown. His "All The Kings Men" has fared much better. Band of Angels is unsparing in its use of language verboten today but quite accurate for the time Like Mark Twain's great works, the ignorant but well-meaning want to ban the use of the word 'nigger', at least by white folk. Penn Warren uses it as it would be sued by his characters. He does not write sexual descriptions but is unsparing when he wants to make a point. I found it curious that in the last few pages, when some self-knowledge had been achieved, the words became less harsh.
At this writing, we are embroiled in a presidential election, probably between a popular convicted felon and the surprise candidate who used to be a criminal prosecutor. We are 70 years on from Band of Angels' first publication. Much of the post-Civil War rancor and hate discussed in the novel has been suppressed during that time. But it has been seeping, indeed bubbling, out of cauldrons of repressed hate. As proposed in "South Pacific", the magisterial Broadway musical which preceded Band of Angels by a few years (and which was still playing at the publication of the novel), racial hate has "Got to Be Carefully Taught". Without a doubt, some of the darker-skinned folk in this nation have been carefully teaching hate, but the powerful, pervasive, corrosive, and malignant brand belongs to white people, especially males. The greatest tragedy may be that so many have no real grasp of why they hate, any more than Warren's characters understand their conflicting emotions.
The story is narrated by an older woman who starts the story when she is very young. She is overwrought, given to acting without thought or understanding. The writing and the style have long been fashionable in this country, but not by any means modern. One could compare this to "Gone With the Wind", Margaret Mitchell's ridiculous whitewash of Southern gentility. Both books were made int movies, some years apart. Both movies starred Clark Gable. One had historical sense and became 'beloved'. The other flopped, even if it barely told the book's story. Therein is an American lesson.
Recommended.
November 10, 2022
Band of Angels is not my favorite Robert Penn Warren novel, but it is another great book with all the high qualities that I've come to expect from him. It is, I would say, a book about identity, freedom, and sanctification. The first two themes are more obvious. The book opens with Amantha Starr’s cry of “Oh, who Am I?” And Amantha returns to this question throughout the story as she seeks her own identity in her circumstances and through the people around her. In the end, however, she come to something similar to Jack Burden's revelation in All the King's Men--that man's defect is to try to know himself by others when he can really only know himself truly before the eyes of God. As to freedom, throughout the book Amantha seeks freedom, and she questions whether she will ever be free, either to do something or to escape from something. The theme of freedom is set up well in the opening pages. Amantha begins her story by ruminating on the meaning of freedom and of nothingness. She wisely sees that nothingness can come through isolating individualism or through crushing communalism. Then throughout the story, Amantha comes to terms with the meaning of freedom and with her own identity in the midst of a large world which she does not control.
Sanctification, or as Warren himself would probably put it, self-knowledge, is less obvious. The title of the book gave me an epiphany (in the middle of the night after finishing the novel). The titular phrase is only used once in the novel, and there it is used in a seemingly inconsequential manner. One of the characters jokingly remarks that a "band of angels" or "a chariot of fire" may sweep someone away "without death's bitterness" directly to paradise. The idea being that we are not carried away direct to heaven, we are not automatically translated to glory by a band of angels or by chariots of fire as Enoch or Elijah were. Our growth, our understanding of life and our realization of joy, is progressive. So many of the characters whom Manty encounters are preoccupied with realizing perfect joy and happiness in this life. Seth Parton’s perfectionism, Tobias Sears' Emersonian idealism, even Miss Idell‘s hedonism. I think RPW is saying, no, that life is not that way. Man is not automatically translated through ideas or pleasures. Rather, as Manty finds, peace and joy in this life may be more like rest and a quietness than like an escape or ecstasy. In her hard-earned wisdom, Manty finds joy through the "struggle and satisfaction of ordinary days," and we too must be perfected through the slow work of time, humility, and affliction.
Sanctification, or as Warren himself would probably put it, self-knowledge, is less obvious. The title of the book gave me an epiphany (in the middle of the night after finishing the novel). The titular phrase is only used once in the novel, and there it is used in a seemingly inconsequential manner. One of the characters jokingly remarks that a "band of angels" or "a chariot of fire" may sweep someone away "without death's bitterness" directly to paradise. The idea being that we are not carried away direct to heaven, we are not automatically translated to glory by a band of angels or by chariots of fire as Enoch or Elijah were. Our growth, our understanding of life and our realization of joy, is progressive. So many of the characters whom Manty encounters are preoccupied with realizing perfect joy and happiness in this life. Seth Parton’s perfectionism, Tobias Sears' Emersonian idealism, even Miss Idell‘s hedonism. I think RPW is saying, no, that life is not that way. Man is not automatically translated through ideas or pleasures. Rather, as Manty finds, peace and joy in this life may be more like rest and a quietness than like an escape or ecstasy. In her hard-earned wisdom, Manty finds joy through the "struggle and satisfaction of ordinary days," and we too must be perfected through the slow work of time, humility, and affliction.
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
January 26, 2021
Fin da bambina, non so per quale misteriosa ragione, ho avuto una passione profonda per i vecchi film, da quelli in bianco e nero a quelli a colori dove spiccavano attori fascinosi e donne dal volto prezioso come quello di un quadro. Tra tutti gli attori che amavo ce n'era uno che aveva conquistato il mio cuore di bambina e che andavo a cercare in tutti i film, dal primissimo ACCADDE UNA NOTTE, al celebre VIA COL VENTO all'intenso MOGAMBO! Ed è stato proprio lui, Clark Gable a portarmi a un film e poi al romanzo di un autore celebre, l'unico scrittore ad aver vinto il Premio Pulitzer sia per la narrativa che per la poesia, Robert Penn Warren. Il libro (e poi anche il film) si intitola LA BANDA DEGLI ANGELI.
La storia ha come eroina Amantha Starr, nata e cresciuta in una piantagione del Kentucky negli anni prima della guerra civile, con un padre affettuoso e legato molto a lei. Alla sua morte, Amantha viene a sapere che sua madre era una schiava e che anche lei deve essere venduta come tale. Quello che segue è un vasto panorama di uno dei periodi più turbolenti della storia americana visto attraverso gli occhi di una giovane donna sfortunata.
Amantha si ritrova presto a New Orleans, dove trascorre gli anni della guerra con Hamish Bond, un uomo di cui si innamora, dal passato oscuro, che le nasconde un segreto che comprometterà la loro relazione. Quando Amantha lo scoprirà, i due si separeranno e alla fine della guerra, sposerà un altro uomo, ma Amantha continuerà a tormentarsi sul senso profondo delle sue origini e della sua identità.
Band of Angels mette in bella mostra il talento narrativo di Robert Penn Warren. Pubblicato per la prima volta nel 1955, è uno dei racconti di fantasia più accesi e vivaci dell'epoca della guerra civile, con un ritratto intenso sulla civiltà e sul turbamento interiore della protagonista che cerca disperatamente di ricostruire il proprio io, sconvolto dalla scoperta delle sue vere origini.
La storia ha come eroina Amantha Starr, nata e cresciuta in una piantagione del Kentucky negli anni prima della guerra civile, con un padre affettuoso e legato molto a lei. Alla sua morte, Amantha viene a sapere che sua madre era una schiava e che anche lei deve essere venduta come tale. Quello che segue è un vasto panorama di uno dei periodi più turbolenti della storia americana visto attraverso gli occhi di una giovane donna sfortunata.
Amantha si ritrova presto a New Orleans, dove trascorre gli anni della guerra con Hamish Bond, un uomo di cui si innamora, dal passato oscuro, che le nasconde un segreto che comprometterà la loro relazione. Quando Amantha lo scoprirà, i due si separeranno e alla fine della guerra, sposerà un altro uomo, ma Amantha continuerà a tormentarsi sul senso profondo delle sue origini e della sua identità.
Band of Angels mette in bella mostra il talento narrativo di Robert Penn Warren. Pubblicato per la prima volta nel 1955, è uno dei racconti di fantasia più accesi e vivaci dell'epoca della guerra civile, con un ritratto intenso sulla civiltà e sul turbamento interiore della protagonista che cerca disperatamente di ricostruire il proprio io, sconvolto dalla scoperta delle sue vere origini.
May 19, 2025
This book did not sit with me well. Why:
-⭐️: If there was anything more “pick me,” than a white girl becoming a slave, this is it. I was excited to see how this book was written in the perspective of a woman, written by a man, especially as a slave. What type of narrative would she bring to the table? How would her perspective of her mother being a slave change her?
In short, it did not. Manty was written so flat it was difficult to read. I struggled to enjoy this book at all.
-⭐️: The “Who am I?” Trope: The book starts with Manty trying to find herself. We never get this addressed as a full-circle. There’s a difference between being resolved and being addressed- I’ve read loads of books, such as Intermezzo, where we come full circle back to our original plot point where “nothing has been resolved,” but everything has been changed. We start with deep, profound thought that’s addressed once or twice and then not brought up.
-⭐️: Information being revealed: Most of the information was revealed through dialogue. This wouldn’t be an issue, except it was the SAME form of dialogue where the character would ask the same question over and over again until someone gave in. Also, Manty would just run away every time she heard something she didn’t like, which was overused to have a scene change? That wouldn’t work socially every time??
-⭐️: The “Romance” & “Suffering”: Manty had it POSH, dude, and yet she was extremely dramatic (Ex: I think I read ‘she cried out,’ or an exclamation point almost every page), and her reactions did not make sense for being a “slave.”
+⭐️: I have never rated a book zero stars intentionally, so I’ll give this novel one star. I tried to give it grace given the social period it was written, who it was written by, and the terms/society playing into the book’s narrative. 😅
-⭐️: If there was anything more “pick me,” than a white girl becoming a slave, this is it. I was excited to see how this book was written in the perspective of a woman, written by a man, especially as a slave. What type of narrative would she bring to the table? How would her perspective of her mother being a slave change her?
In short, it did not. Manty was written so flat it was difficult to read. I struggled to enjoy this book at all.
-⭐️: The “Who am I?” Trope: The book starts with Manty trying to find herself. We never get this addressed as a full-circle. There’s a difference between being resolved and being addressed- I’ve read loads of books, such as Intermezzo, where we come full circle back to our original plot point where “nothing has been resolved,” but everything has been changed. We start with deep, profound thought that’s addressed once or twice and then not brought up.
-⭐️: Information being revealed: Most of the information was revealed through dialogue. This wouldn’t be an issue, except it was the SAME form of dialogue where the character would ask the same question over and over again until someone gave in. Also, Manty would just run away every time she heard something she didn’t like, which was overused to have a scene change? That wouldn’t work socially every time??
-⭐️: The “Romance” & “Suffering”: Manty had it POSH, dude, and yet she was extremely dramatic (Ex: I think I read ‘she cried out,’ or an exclamation point almost every page), and her reactions did not make sense for being a “slave.”
+⭐️: I have never rated a book zero stars intentionally, so I’ll give this novel one star. I tried to give it grace given the social period it was written, who it was written by, and the terms/society playing into the book’s narrative. 😅
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
June 7, 2020
"Men, he said, had fought a bloody war for the value of Ideas, but in victory they had betrayed all to the Moloch of Thingism, and now in a land that had once produced statesmen, prophets, explorers, scientists, poets, and seers, we found politicians who were gate-keepers for pelf . . . and philosophers who would justify all."
The themes are big: temptation, guilt, self-hatred, and the hold the past has on the present. The story takes place before, during, and after the Civil War, and there are some complicated racial themes introduced as well. It is an ambitious book, but not good, unfortunately. Robert Penn Warren writes the entire story in the first person from the perspective of a female character. It is a bad choice. Sections in the first half of this book are somehow boring, melodramatic, and offensive all at the same time. The second half is better, but the novel is still not worth reading overall. A disappointment from Warren, who wrote one of my all-time favorites All the King's Men.
The themes are big: temptation, guilt, self-hatred, and the hold the past has on the present. The story takes place before, during, and after the Civil War, and there are some complicated racial themes introduced as well. It is an ambitious book, but not good, unfortunately. Robert Penn Warren writes the entire story in the first person from the perspective of a female character. It is a bad choice. Sections in the first half of this book are somehow boring, melodramatic, and offensive all at the same time. The second half is better, but the novel is still not worth reading overall. A disappointment from Warren, who wrote one of my all-time favorites All the King's Men.
January 3, 2019
Finally I found a book that made me want to stay up all night to finish it -- capturing a wonderful relationship with books that I began as a young child. I apparently had read this before, but only have a vague memory of it. It is a very powerful book -- a strong and mostly compelling story, immersed in the history of pre and post Civil War US, and of course touching on issues of gender and race in ways that are extremely thought provoking. There are no clear angels in this book, and I must say the ending seems a bit packaged, but the writing is beautiful and intelligent, and I found myself pausing from time to time and thinking back on the story to draw together the numerous themes that pervade it. As my first book of the year, this will be a hard one to top!
August 26, 2020
Remarkable, challenging, personal, gritty, idealistic.
Amantha Starr is a mulatto in 1840s Cincinnati, only she doesn't know it. Her loving father sends he to boarding school at Oberlin, but when he dies as a philanderer in a woman's bed, Amantha's fortune turn. She's sold into the slavery by the man who bought out her father's property, shipped down river to New Orleans, and embarks on a saga of racial identity in America crossing between white and black cultures.
Dense, complex plotting, thorough historical back-up; tragic, unvarnished truth; reminiscent of "All the King's Men" of five years earlier for its gimlet-eyed realism. (Likely drawn from Warren's experience as a man of Kentucky, a hundred years hence...)
Amantha Starr is a mulatto in 1840s Cincinnati, only she doesn't know it. Her loving father sends he to boarding school at Oberlin, but when he dies as a philanderer in a woman's bed, Amantha's fortune turn. She's sold into the slavery by the man who bought out her father's property, shipped down river to New Orleans, and embarks on a saga of racial identity in America crossing between white and black cultures.
Dense, complex plotting, thorough historical back-up; tragic, unvarnished truth; reminiscent of "All the King's Men" of five years earlier for its gimlet-eyed realism. (Likely drawn from Warren's experience as a man of Kentucky, a hundred years hence...)
May 3, 2019
L'héroïne du livre, Amatha Starr, décrit le péripétie de sa vie qui chevauche la guerre civile. Femme de peau blanche, elle ne sait pas qu'elle est fille d'une esclave et est vendue à la mort de son père. C'est là que son cauchemar commence. L'histoire nous fait voyager au travers des États-Unis, nous fait ressentir les souffrances des afro-américains, et nous donne une idée de la haine de certains sudistes envers le gens de couleurs. J'ai trouvé la lecture un peu ardue (car l'histoire évolue en dents de scie) mais j'ai quand même apprécié.
December 8, 2019
Band of Angels is a wonderful book. The first sentence is "OH, WHO AM I?" The characters' identity issues are a major theme, in addition to the background of slavery, the Civil War and the stifling of Reconstruction. Three major players are other than they appear at first. The author visits many times the question of how we should identify ourselves. Am I a different person from the person who existed in my body 20 years ago? This is a book that merits a reread.
January 21, 2018
Letto in italiano ovviamente, ma non trovo l'edizione Bompiani qua su goodreads
February 4, 2021
very well written just took to long for me to read nothing to do with the book
June 24, 2021
This is a great potboiler.
March 20, 2024
Not quite as successful as All the King's Men, which was a knockout. It was great in spurts, but the confusing political situation during Reconstruction was hard to follow.
June 18, 2025
Very disappointed in this. Usually I love his novels but this one ran out of steam about half way through and never recovered.
April 4, 2021
Very thoughtful and intelligent.
A deep and uncommon look into relationships in the Southern United States.
A deep and uncommon look into relationships in the Southern United States.
March 2, 2013
Robert Penn Warren gets in a vivid "All the King's Men"-like zone for the last quarter of "Band of Angels," and that lifts this 1955 novel right near the top of Warren's non-Pulitzer-winning output. This tale of race in the Civil War era, told by a first-person female narrator, finishes like a champ.
In "Band of Angels," Amantha Starr grows up knowing only her father, her mother having died in childbirth and her body residing not in the cemetery but near their Louisiana home. Amantha, who lives as and looks white, grows up not knowing that her mother was a slave. When her father dies while owing a debt, Amantha finds out about her past and becomes a man's property at the same time. Amantha struggles with her identity while she passes to another man, Hamish Bond, who treats her well generally while not giving her her freedom, who has "the easy rule of kindness like a disease."
Amantha comes to learn of Bond's role as an illegal slave trader — a very effective extended passage — even as their relationship grows more complicated and Bond's right-hand man, a troubled, conflicted, charismatic black man named Rau-Ru, becomes embroiled in Amantha's and Bond's lives.
In time, Bond and Amantha part as the Civil War deepens, she marries a man who eventually joins the Freedman's Bureau and works for black men's suffrage after the war. Warren's handling of this part of the novel is a little butterfingered, his explanation of the political situation not very clear. But when a convention is called and violence intrudes on the issue of the black vote, however murky the waters, Warren starts to shine brightly. Amantha's plight and emotional intensity get ratcheted up big time, and the last 100 pages of the novel are brilliant.
In some ways, one could say Warren fails to get into the head of his mixed-race heroine. But, really, Amantha has trouble getting into her own head, starting the novel by asking "Who am I?"
From the novel:
"Was life only that, a re-enactment of what you thought you could not bear, but which was, somehow, the very essence of what yourself was?"
"It was, in a way, as though the thing not done — the flight not made — is always done, too, and never releases you from the grip of the old possibility, and you can only escape from the done, never from the not-done, which in its not-doneness is always being enacted forever."
For the record, it's unclear what the title "Band of Angels" means.
In "Band of Angels," Amantha Starr grows up knowing only her father, her mother having died in childbirth and her body residing not in the cemetery but near their Louisiana home. Amantha, who lives as and looks white, grows up not knowing that her mother was a slave. When her father dies while owing a debt, Amantha finds out about her past and becomes a man's property at the same time. Amantha struggles with her identity while she passes to another man, Hamish Bond, who treats her well generally while not giving her her freedom, who has "the easy rule of kindness like a disease."
Amantha comes to learn of Bond's role as an illegal slave trader — a very effective extended passage — even as their relationship grows more complicated and Bond's right-hand man, a troubled, conflicted, charismatic black man named Rau-Ru, becomes embroiled in Amantha's and Bond's lives.
In time, Bond and Amantha part as the Civil War deepens, she marries a man who eventually joins the Freedman's Bureau and works for black men's suffrage after the war. Warren's handling of this part of the novel is a little butterfingered, his explanation of the political situation not very clear. But when a convention is called and violence intrudes on the issue of the black vote, however murky the waters, Warren starts to shine brightly. Amantha's plight and emotional intensity get ratcheted up big time, and the last 100 pages of the novel are brilliant.
In some ways, one could say Warren fails to get into the head of his mixed-race heroine. But, really, Amantha has trouble getting into her own head, starting the novel by asking "Who am I?"
From the novel:
"Was life only that, a re-enactment of what you thought you could not bear, but which was, somehow, the very essence of what yourself was?"
"It was, in a way, as though the thing not done — the flight not made — is always done, too, and never releases you from the grip of the old possibility, and you can only escape from the done, never from the not-done, which in its not-doneness is always being enacted forever."
For the record, it's unclear what the title "Band of Angels" means.
February 26, 2010
This book is not like the movie.
Bad start for a book review, right? It's relevant here because I saw the movie - a romance starring Clark Gable that deals surprisingly frankly with sexual issues - so I decided to see what the book was like. I had no idea it was written by the same man who wrote All The King's Men. That explains why:
1) It is not a romance.
2) It is Deep and Philosophical and our heroine struggles with Predestination vs Free Will.
Personally, because I'd seen the film, I was looking for more to be done in the historical romance vein - especially since so few current romances are set in the antebellum South. In that I was disappointed.
The book deftly works in real historical characters and is a true page-turner. Despite my increasing annoyance with the book, I read 'til the very end.
I think if you like Civil War era historical fiction, you'll like this - if you haven't seen the movie.
Bad start for a book review, right? It's relevant here because I saw the movie - a romance starring Clark Gable that deals surprisingly frankly with sexual issues - so I decided to see what the book was like. I had no idea it was written by the same man who wrote All The King's Men. That explains why:
1) It is not a romance.
2) It is Deep and Philosophical and our heroine struggles with Predestination vs Free Will.
Personally, because I'd seen the film, I was looking for more to be done in the historical romance vein - especially since so few current romances are set in the antebellum South. In that I was disappointed.
The book deftly works in real historical characters and is a true page-turner. Despite my increasing annoyance with the book, I read 'til the very end.
I think if you like Civil War era historical fiction, you'll like this - if you haven't seen the movie.
June 17, 2014
Interesting story set before, during and after the Civil War, told from the perspective of a woman who was raised as a white plantation owner's daughter and, on his death, learned that her mother was a slave and that she herself was considered black. She is subsequently sold and spends the rest of the book seeking her identity, not being fully comfortable in either the black or the white world.
Nobody in this story is firmly good or bad. Some of them swing wildly into both categories.
Extensive use of the N word throughout the book. Not sure if that reflects the times that the story was set in or the times when the author wrote it, but it distracted me from the story and the writing. Which is a shame because All The King's Men by Robert Penn Warren is one of my favorite books.
Nobody in this story is firmly good or bad. Some of them swing wildly into both categories.
Extensive use of the N word throughout the book. Not sure if that reflects the times that the story was set in or the times when the author wrote it, but it distracted me from the story and the writing. Which is a shame because All The King's Men by Robert Penn Warren is one of my favorite books.
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