A Walk Through Fire

By William Cobb

Book Overview

1961: Disorder and angst brew in Hammond, Alabama -- a town plagued with racial unrest and torn between lifelong loyalties and prejudices. As strife boils to the surface with mass demonstrations, riots, and ultimately bloodshed, Cobb's characters face an unthinkable struggle to find order and commonality among people they've known all their lives. More intimately, A Walk Through Fire is an intricate love story between a man and a woman separated by race and joined by an unquenchable longing to recreate the past, a time when truth was found within. Originally published in hardcover in 1992 by William Morrow & Company, and reprinted in 1993 by Avon, A Walk Through Fire ranks definitively among Cobb's masterworks.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0380718324
• ISBN13: 9780380718320
• Release Date: January 1993
• Publisher: Avon Books
• Length: 416 Pages
• Weight: 0.55 lbs.
• Dimensions: 7.0" x 1.3" x 4.3"

Customer Reviews

Nice book

This book is mainly about civil disobedience and a white man who sided with Blacks. It takes place in Alabama during the sixties. Sometimes the book moved very slowly, but overall it was a great novel. There are many subplots such as love stories contained within the real plot. This leaves the reader thinking more and more.

Engaging story about the South in the early Civil Rights Era

I read an earlier edition of this book a few years ago and am so glad to see it re-released. I have lived in the South all my life, through the time and in the kinds of places where this novel is set--a small Alabama town during the early sixties. This novel broadened my knowledge of how different people from different walks of life experienced this time. Characters are drawn with sensitivity and compassion, and the reader can sympathize with those on both sides of the struggle. They are not stereotypical, as I know that whites and "rednecks" were not all the same and not all anti-black, and not all African Americans were the same. The characters play themselves out in a very tragic and engaging plot that carried me back to my childhood, making me feel both pride and shame in being a white person from Alabama. Cobb does an especially good job handling the shifts from present to past (flashbacks). A friend of mine was writing a "Civil Rights novel" using flashbacks, and I referred him to A Walk Through Fire as an example of how they can be done well.