Life and loves of a seminal figure in 19th-century American literature.
Portrait of the woman who wrote Uncle Tom’s Cabin and changed America.
The life of Harriet Beecher Stowe (1811–96) was unusual, especially for a woman of her era. Her father, Lyman Beecher, Boston’s thundering Abolitionist theologian, impressed upon young Harriet the importance of Calvinist family values. Henry Ward Beecher became America’s premier 19th-century preacher; Harriet, the conscience of its literature. McFarland (Hawthorne in Concord, 2004, etc.) mines Stowe’s correspondence to explain why she raised her quill: The salary of her husband, clergyman-academic Calvin Stowe, hardly supported their growing brood. Once writing—and later as family breadwinner—she drew upon various transformational experiences, first in light prose, then in more formidable work. Living in Cincinnati when Lyman founded Lane Theological Seminary, she absorbed that town’s abolitionist fervor—she was familiar with the Underground Railroad and researched slavery before writing her famous novel. McFarland’s detailing of the North-South political chasm over slavery, especially in 1852 as the serialization of Uncle Tom Cabin’s began, is not only scholarly, but stylishly dramatic. The author moves on to examine the immense popularity of Stowe’s work by showing how it rallied Northerners to Abolitionism while intensifying Southern rage. As the author of the first major American novel featuring a black hero, Stowe was a global celebrity, and McFarland rightly contextualizes Uncle Tom’s Cabin alongside her many other works. Stowe also lectured widely, and McFarland’s description of Stowe’s European travails offers a reflection on America’s anguished spirit. Among some of the “loves” to which McFarland alludes: Lord Byron’s widow, Walt Whitman and Abraham Lincoln (who may or may not have said, “So you’re the little lady who started the war”). As chapter titles indicate, there was Lyman, Henry Ward, other far-flung siblings, her husband and seven children, four of whom predeceased their mother. McFarland persuasively speculates that son Samuel’s untimely death clarified her take on Uncle Tom’s Cabin: If she could picture a slave mother sold away from her children—a heart-wrenching scene—she could picture it all.
Life and loves of a seminal figure in 19th-century American literature.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2007
ISBN: 978-0-8021-1845-5
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Grove
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2007
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.
Greed, depravity, and serial murder in 1920s Oklahoma.
During that time, enrolled members of the Osage Indian nation were among the wealthiest people per capita in the world. The rich oil fields beneath their reservation brought millions of dollars into the tribe annually, distributed to tribal members holding "headrights" that could not be bought or sold but only inherited. This vast wealth attracted the attention of unscrupulous whites who found ways to divert it to themselves by marrying Osage women or by having Osage declared legally incompetent so the whites could fleece them through the administration of their estates. For some, however, these deceptive tactics were not enough, and a plague of violent death—by shooting, poison, orchestrated automobile accident, and bombing—began to decimate the Osage in what they came to call the "Reign of Terror." Corrupt and incompetent law enforcement and judicial systems ensured that the perpetrators were never found or punished until the young J. Edgar Hoover saw cracking these cases as a means of burnishing the reputation of the newly professionalized FBI. Bestselling New Yorker staff writer Grann (The Devil and Sherlock Holmes: Tales of Murder, Madness, and Obsession, 2010, etc.) follows Special Agent Tom White and his assistants as they track the killers of one extended Osage family through a closed local culture of greed, bigotry, and lies in pursuit of protection for the survivors and justice for the dead. But he doesn't stop there; relying almost entirely on primary and unpublished sources, the author goes on to expose a web of conspiracy and corruption that extended far wider than even the FBI ever suspected. This page-turner surges forward with the pacing of a true-crime thriller, elevated by Grann's crisp and evocative prose and enhanced by dozens of period photographs.
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.Pub Date: April 18, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-385-53424-6
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2017
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
© Copyright 2024 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
