Perfect for Tubman novices but also enjoyable historical reading for those who already know most of the stories.
A concise primer for adults who know the name Harriet Tubman (c. 1822-1913) but want to know more.
Dunbar (History/Rutgers Univ.)—whose second book, Never Caught: The Washingtons’ Relentless Pursuit of Their Runaway Slave, Ona Judge (2017), was a co-winner of the 2018 Frederick Douglass Book Award—is more concerned with letting history come alive than burying it beneath the trappings of academic scholarship—though the notes and bibliography show that she has done her homework. “Here then, presented in a way that I hope is accessible, informative, contemporary, and full of black girl magic, is the multidimensional story of Harriet Tubman Davis, a true boss lady, a superhero, and a warrior,” writes Dunbar in the opening author’s note. From a girlhood bout of epilepsy and a head injury that gave her seizures to her strong religious convictions, Tubman felt that she was guided by “visions and images that predicted the future,” dreams that would alert her to danger and guide her actions “literally for the rest of her life.” Dunbar thus makes the same leap of faith that Tubman did (and encourages readers to do so, as well): to give her mission a sense of divine guidance and purpose. During her life, her God worked in mysterious ways, responding to her prayers to end the life of the 47-year-old slave owner who was planning to put her and some of her brothers on the auction block. She prayed for his death, her prayers were answered, and “Harriet’s immediate reaction to the news was pure joy.” Her single-minded conviction and fortitude not only served her well as a runaway slave who helped so many others escape; they guided her through a life of service, tending to the medical care of Civil War soldiers, fighting for suffrage, and working to establish a home for the aged and indigent. With illustrations and catchy asides enhancing the conversational style, this smoothly readable narrative tells a story kept alive through oral tradition for decades.
Perfect for Tubman novices but also enjoyable historical reading for those who already know most of the stories.Pub Date: Nov. 5, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-982139-59-9
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Sept. 10, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2019
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
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