SOURCE: "A Yarn Finely Spun," in Newsweek, June 23, 1997, p. 73.

[In the following review, Jones offers a highly positive review of Cold Mountain.]

Novelists are never in short supply. Natural-born storytellers come along only rarely. Charles Frazier joins the ranks of that elite cadre on the first page of his astonishing debut, Cold Mountain. A Civil War soldier, Inman, is recuperating from a gunshot wound in an army hospital in Raleigh, N.C., where he passes the time reading naturalist William Bartram's Travels and staring out the window. "The window was tall as a door, and he had imagined many times that it would open onto some other place and let him walk through and be there." That sentence is like a hand in the small of your back. At the end of that chapter, when Inman skips out of the hospital and heads for home in the mountains...