The Wrath to Come: Gone with the Wind and the Lies America Tells
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The Wrath to Come: Gone with the Wind and the Lies America Tells Audible Audiobook – Unabridged

Sarah Churchwell (Author, Narrator), W. F. Howes Ltd (Publisher)
4.4 4.4 out of 5 stars 147 ratings
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The history America never wanted you to learn.

'The narrative took my breath away' Philippe Sands

'An extraordinarily and shockingly powerful read' Peter Frankopan

'One of the must-reads of the year' Suzannah Lipscomb

'Brilliant and provocative' Gavin Esler

Sarah Churchwell examines one of the most enduringly popular stories of all time, Gone with the Wind, to help explain the divisions ripping the United States apart today. Separating fact from fiction, she shows how histories of mythmaking have informed America's racial and gender politics, the controversies over Confederate statues, the resurgence of white nationalism, the Black Lives Matter movement, the enduring power of the American Dream, and the violence of Trumpism.

Gone with the Wind was an instant bestseller when it was published in 1936; its film version became the most successful Hollywood film of all time. Today the story's racism is again a subject of controversy, but it was just as controversial in the 1930s, foreshadowing today's debates over race and American fascism. In The Wrath to Come, Sarah Churchwell charts an extraordinary journey through 160 years of American denialism. From the Lost Cause to the romances behind the Ku Klux Klan, from the invention of the 'ideal' slave plantation to the erasure of interwar fascism, Churchwell shows what happens when we do violence to history, as collective denial turns fictions into lies, and lies into a vicious reality.

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  1. Listening Length
    12 hours and 27 minutes
  2. Author
    Sarah Churchwell
  3. Narrator
    Sarah Churchwell
  4. Audible release date
    December 15, 2022
  5. Language
    English
  6. Publisher
    W. F. Howes Ltd
  7. ASIN
    B0BKH455SD
  8. Version
    Unabridged
  9. Program Type
    Audiobook
  10. See all details
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Product details

Listening Length 12 hours and 27 minutes
Author Sarah Churchwell
Narrator Sarah Churchwell
Whispersync for Voice Ready
Audible.com Release Date December 15, 2022
Publisher W. F. Howes Ltd
Program Type Audiobook
Version Unabridged
Language English
ASIN B0BKH455SD
Best Sellers Rank #200,024 in Audible Books & Originals (See Top 100 in Audible Books & Originals)
#609 in Film & TV
#713 in Literary History & Criticism
#905 in US State & Local History

Customer reviews

4.4 out of 5 stars
4.4 out of 5
147 global ratings

Top reviews from the United States

GoodDay
5.0 out of 5 stars I've been waiting for someone to write this book...
Reviewed in the United States on August 31, 2022
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... and Sarah Churchwell brought so much more to the subject than I had imagined. I first read Gone With the Wind as a teenager and was focused solely on the romance. Then in my 20s, I reread it as a lesson plan on how to screw up a romance.

Finally, I reread GWTW in my 30s and was struck by the undeniable racism in the book, heaving from every page. The subtitle should be "Celebrating White Supremacy" -- it is nothing more than a justification for the creation of the Ku Klux Klan. It's no wonder we White Americans become inculcated with racism, such that we don't even see it. It's baked right in to our DNA.

Sarah Churchwell does a masterful job at defining the exact sentences in GWTW that speak to our racist culture, that we have lapped up with a spoon throughout all of recorded history in the Americas. Then she rightfully links that proclivity toward white supremacy through our 19th and 20th century history right up to the Trumpists' divisive words and the Jan. 6 insurrection that he fomented.

Read this book. It's a seminal work on Americans, our institutional racism, and how that racism was built and supported over the years. If you want to make the world better, you have to start from where we are.

This probably makes me sound like I hate America. I don't. I chose to return and live here in my native country after living in Europe for a time. It's the best place I've ever been. America just needs to clean up its act, to acknowledge its faults, and to accept its diversity and weave that into the richness that it can achieve.
27 people found this helpful
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Paul
5.0 out of 5 stars Professor Churchwell lays bare the influence the Lost Cause Myth had upon GWTW
Reviewed in the United States on January 28, 2023
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An explosive work. Churchwell's deep dive into GWTW shows it to be much more racist and imbued with the Lost Cause mythology than I had had previously thought. She does not support the efforts of some to ban GWTW. She seems to have committed a few errors, as other reviewers have brought to light, but none of them really detract from the general tenor of her analysis. Interesting and insightful discussion of GWTW and the Lost Cause mythology influence upon Trumpism and the 1-6 insurrection.
4 people found this helpful
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wmjmc
5.0 out of 5 stars Teaching with lightning!
Reviewed in the United States on May 22, 2023
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Great no holds barred look at how ignorance leads to the survival of old sins. Racism has always been our original sin. It is our ongoing tragedy and why we cannot have nice things.
4 people found this helpful
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aawillis
5.0 out of 5 stars THE WRATH TO COME: GONE WITH THE WIND
Reviewed in the United States on October 2, 2022
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I bought this book for my daughter and son-in-law. They tell me it’s great.
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Mark Mayes
1.0 out of 5 stars More Biased Than GWTW ever was--will you give a damn?
Reviewed in the United States on June 17, 2023
Sarah Churchwell opines that GWTW is a skeleton key to making sense out of Trump and The White American Mindset. Much of her book centers loudly around the concept, mentioned in GWTW, of the “Lost Cause”. A definition explained with a not just a little patronizing by Margaret Mitchell herself in the novel.
Ms. Churchwell thinks that she understands how guilt is a leveler for American White People. But she is disingenuous. It is the same for all races everywhere: gangs, tribes, religions. No race is exonerated from the primal urges that are human—whether its sexual or violent impulses—civilization is a veneer we teach that allows us to survive and function. Mitchell describes clearly the rules we learn and the emotional reactions that are at variance with social decency, which is often unpleasant, but is at the core of human existence. No one learns much through guilt, only through empathy.

I imagine that the author subscribes to some religion that uses guilt to enforce good behavior. She implies that no one in GWTW is guilty enough and she sets herself as the arbiter of what the fictional characters really lacked and what the audiences for the story lack as well.

Ms. Churchwell cites “historical reality” as opposed to The Lost Cause Myth and her references serve her well and are cited, as they are by all argumentative authors to validate their argument. She never plays devil’s advocate—which would have made this book more interesting and less of a guilt-ridden plod.

She certainly never mentions the slave records of the Smithsonian, which delve into all sides of the slave experience—the recollections are not all nightmares, which only make a point that the brutality was not always relentless as in the case of The Holocaust, but unforgiveable as an institution and as its own unique horror. The strain remains to get GWTW to encapsulate fascistic, mercenary, greedy, capitalistic America which have already been disarmed by Mitchell’s honesty in writing about them and their moral and physical costs to the perpetrators. Churchwell just doesn’t want to glamourize the nuances that give Scarlett soul…but have obviously captivated her as well. Like a vegetarian who’s just learned the pate is meat and is furious.

There are some factual mistakes in the book that were almost surprising, except the mistakes didn’t strengthen Churchwell’s argument. I filled up eight pages of annotations discussing the theories and facts that were inaccurate or did not provide full info. Some of it is slight---TV premiere was 76, not 77—but I would have thought the Bicentennial irony would have been a great temptation given the argument. There are really so many, I don't know where to begin (at some point saying that Vivien Leigh denied her Indian origins. From my research, Miss Leigh never really KNEW about her origins as her mother was very tight-lipped about them, but was not the sort of woman who ever really cared about stuff like that.)

Her arguments are set up to be provoking-Scarlett and Rhett are homicidal white supremacists? Churchwell thinks that calling Rhett and Scarlett homicidal is worse than calling them murderers. She is trying to make a point that the deeds are coming from psychologically unsound people. I suppose Scarlett should have made nice with the Yankee intruder, taking no pleasure in killing the symbol of private invasion the he presented. Her point is more in line with her description of Rhett being homicidal because he kills a black man who (somehow—we never know for sure) “insulted” a white woman. But since Churchwell believes there were no cavaliers or chivalry in the South, there can be no other word for violent acts (agreed!) But her knowledge of the South and the crazy customs that even still are enforced there is pitiful.
She speaks in monoliths and anyone outside of the approved monolith is racist or are spoken about as philistines.

These are the sorts of books that rob "racist" of its power, which we see slowly diminishing as an effective epithet.

Of course the Old South was built on slave labor and attitudes of hierarchy were firmly in place. Understanding Scarlett's viewpoint and reviling it, don't elevate anyone. But Churchwell never gets, like most critics of GWTW, the soul of it--which she sees as dark. She never examines why it is so internationally popular. She should have tried.
The magic of GWTW is that the fierce subjectivity of the characters, warts and all--either organic or imposed by the audience, are what make people--black and white--find the characters human and recognizable, giving us insight about ourselves that we do not freely admit. It's difficult to find anyone who thinks completely Scarlett's admirable. But flawed characters speak to us--Don Corleone (racist and sexist and "homicidal"), Rick Blane (racist, sexist and "homicidal").A lot of people admire those characters but will beat up on Scarlett because she is a woman. The terror of straight geeks who are afraid women are as duplicitous as Scarlett and the scourge of pious women and men who feel they should have a free reign to bash anything associated with even the comeuppance of The Civil War. They smart under the idea that the White South wasn't repentant enough. They are sure they still aren't and that the attitude is spreading.
Well, if it is, it isn't due to GWTW. Do we really think that today's fanatical Trumpers could sit through a 3 3/4 hour film--or READ a 1,037 paged book?

Ms. Churchwell is not here to discuss art. She is raging at the politics of today and cherry picks like all debaters.
8 people found this helpful
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Top reviews from other countries

MR Paul TERRY
5.0 out of 5 stars GWTW's white supremacists' agenda was a big shock for me
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on July 11, 2022
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Professor Sarah Churchwell applies her great erudition and insightful mind to a great icon of popular American culture : Gone with the Wind (GWTW). I was familiar with the film but not the novel. The book expertly reveals GWTHs white supremacist’s agenda. A big shock for me because I have strong memories of the novel performing well in the BBC Big Read poll fairly recently and the film regularly appearing in all time great film polls.

“The Wrath To Come” had some fascinating and illuminating facts and analysis:
-Rhett Butler and Scarlet O’Hare are overt white supremacists. Another main character ,Ashley, is a Klu Kluc Klan chief.
-The novel often used the the n-word and this word appeared in the original film script until the Black actors objected.
-GWTW’s Jewish film producer David Selznick approved of the first wave of the Klu Kluck Klan but not of the second wave ( which was ant- Semitic)
-an analysis of the complex sexual politics between Rhett and Scarlett implied by Rhetts” You’re no lady … and I’m no gentleman “remark
-The white American supremacist attitudes which lead to “the wrath to come”[a James Baldwin phrase] the storming of the Capitol Building by Trump supporters in January 2021.
A worthy sequel and equal to “ Behold, America” and “Careless People “ and “The many lives of Marilyn Monroe “ !
15 people found this helpful
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Alan Myers
5.0 out of 5 stars Amazing book!
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on July 18, 2023
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Want to know why all those MAGA people think bonkers things and can’t be argued with? The answer is that the American Civil War was never admitted as a defeat in the South. Instead an alternative reality’ was created “the lost cause”. This book takes you through the story by looking at the sanitised view of the complexities of the war as portrayed in Gone with the Wind. I thought this wouldn’t be interesting at all, but it totally clarifies America’s flirtation with fascism and election denialism, by skilfully blending timelines from the Civil War and Jim Crow with Gone with the wind and trumpism. Brilliant!
4 people found this helpful
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Michael Whelan
5.0 out of 5 stars Underlying concepts
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on June 2, 2023
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The book is written in a somewhat polemical style, and is no worse for that. The controlled puncturing of the assumptions contained within Gone with the Wind brought me a much deeper understanding of the prejudice of the society that helped create it.
3 people found this helpful
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c&c hydraulics
5.0 out of 5 stars A horrific story of brutality
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on August 30, 2022
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The American dream suffers with the truth laid bare a bunch of extreme right wing nazis who take to murdering black people as easy as smoking a cigar and no one or nothing in place to protect humanity. A belief they are the entitled people, Christian beliefs have definitely passed them by .
2 people found this helpful
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Ms. P. Hyde
5.0 out of 5 stars History, Culture, Narrative and Reality Collide
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on October 9, 2022
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This is an interesting approach to history and the stories we tell ourselves about ourselves. Churchwell explores the contemporary resonances of the text and gives a reader insight into how aspects of the Civil War were fought and continue to be fought in the US today.
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