Set in an alternate United States, in which Abraham Lincoln was assassinated before taking office, the Civil War was never fought, and slaves were never emancipated, Underground Airlines is the story of a young black man (who goes by various names) working as a bounty hunter for the US Marshal service. His job? Hunting escaped slaves in contemporary America. First, this was a very well-written book. It’s in the style of a hard-boiled detective novel, and the world building by Ben Winters is fairly well […]
A 200 year old forgotten war that inspired more thought than I’d expected.
This is a fairly difficult book for me to review, because I quite enjoyed it but have some serious complaints about not only its content, but the views of its author. The book itself is well researched, and the subject was interesting, being an area and an era with which I’m fairly unfamiliar. The time between the American Revolution and the Civil War, the antebellum years, has always been a bit out of reach for me. I can never really remember which president served at […]
What’s old is new again.
I spent a large portion of my teenage life aspiring to be an artist, and I surrounded myself with art books. Hell, my screen name (which I’ve used since the mid-90s) comes from a French Neoclassical artist. For all that, however, I mostly only read the books for the pictures – not the text. So while I’ve memorized every line in some of Ingres’ sketches, or Michelangelo’s sculptures, I can give only quick outlines of Leonardo, or Michaelangelo, or Delacroix, or any number of other […]
Never forget your humanity, or that of other people.
Kindred is a first-person narrative of a woman, Dana, and her husband, Kevin, being pulled back in time to save the life of her ancestor, Rufus, who seems perpetually prone to disaster. The catch is that she’s African American and Rufus is white, and lives in Antebellum Maryland. I loved this book so hard. The germ of this book occurred to Octavia Butler after she heard the anger of a young black consciousness activist targeting the subservience in older generations towards oppressive white culture. Paired […]