Gilead.

GoodReads Synopsis: In 1956, toward the end of Reverend John Ames's life, he begins a letter to his young son, an account of himself and his forebears. Ames is the son of an Iowan preacher and the grandson of a minister who, as a young man in Maine, saw a vision of Christ bound in chains and came west to Kansas to fight for abolition: He "preached men into the Civil War," then, at age fifty, became a chaplain in the Union Army, losing his right eye in battle. Reverend Ames writes to his son about the tension between his father--an ardent pacifist--and his grandfather, whose pistol and bloody shirts, concealed in an army blanket, may be relics from the fight between the abolitionists and those settlers who wanted to vote Kansas into the union as a slave state. And he tells a story of the sacred bonds between fathers and sons, which are tested in his tender and strained relationship with his namesake, John Ames Boughton, his best friend's wayward son.

This is also the tale of another remarkable vision--not a corporeal vision of God but the vision of life as a wondrously strange creation. It tells how wisdom was forged in Ames's soul during his solitary life, and how history lives through generations, pervasively present even when betrayed and forgotten.

My Thoughts:  This is my second Pulitzer Prize winning book in the last two years, and each of them have left me wondering who in the world gives out this award.  It only took me 150 pages into this 247 page book to find a plot.  I know it was supposed to be a journal from a dying father to his son, so it was going to ramble and not follow a typical storyline.  However, it was incredibly non-linear at many times jumping from scene to scene, character to character then back again that frustrated me immensely.  What saved this book from one star was a lot of the wisdom that was present in Reverend Ames's musings and the story with John Ames Boughton that finally went somewhere in the last twenty pages.  Two stars.