The Hunt for Confederate Gold by Thomas Mooreby
Clyde Wilson
Decentralization. Anti-war. Anti-Empire. Evil federal agents thwarted in the 21st century. Lincoln’s handiwork unraveling. Gold standard restored. There is nothing for LewRockwell.com readers not to like in Thomas Moore’s novel released July 21. The author is a disillusioned former Pentagon official and Republican insider who has accepted that the Empire is irredeemable and knows where some of its weak spots are. He has given us a near-plausible, near future, hope-raising scenario of how it might be driven into retreat. It would be very wrong of me to give away the plot of Moore’s truly gripping tale. Let me say that there are two stories, one set in the last days of the War for Southern Independence and the other in the present. Suspense is sustained beautifully in both stories as they approach intersection. There are brave but believable heroes (and a brave and beautiful heroine) resisting evil government. There is adventure on the sea, a coded treasure message from the past, and a cliffhanger climax that promises a sequel. Some of it even takes place in the South Carolina swamps that harbored Francis Marion’s famous partisans of the Revolution. I am making The Hunt for Confederate Gold sound a bit like Indiana Jones, which is not the right idea at all. It is more like a story of the French Resistance. Or better still, it is Atlas Shrugged without the nastiness and atheism and by an author who actually knows something about America. Unlike the other anti-Empire novels that I can recall, this is not a fantasy of apocalypse and Randian super-heroes. The author has created a real world and real people, or rather what the real world might be with just a slight providential spin off its present course. The characters, good and bad, are plausible beings. That is, except for one character, Professor Parker Hastie, who is thought to be based on a notorious Southern scholar who sometimes writes for LewRockwell.com. From what I know of the real man, the character is far superior in quality. July 26, 2005 Dr. Wilson [send him mail] is professor of history at the University of South Carolina and editor of The Papers of John C. Calhoun. Copyright © 2005 LewRockwell.com |
I
guarantee that after reading The Hunt for Confederate Gold
you will have a new and more hopeful feeling about the future of
the United States of America.