I’m of two minds on Underground Airlines. On the one hand, judging it strictly on its own merits, it’s an thought-provoking and interesting book. The basic premise is that the Civil War never happened, and slavery was never abolished. It still exists in the United States in four southern states (the “Hard Four”). The story centers around Victor, an escaped slave who was caught by the government and now works for them as a sort of bounty hunter, tracking down other escaped slaves. In Underground […]
Romance among resistance
Courtney Milan has been a vocal fan of Alyssa Cole for awhile now, and I’m a vocal fan of Courtney Milan, so I have been harboring guilt for waiting until now to read Cole. Something about the blurbs for her previous series weren’t setting me on fire, but An Extraordinary Union sounded unique and daring — a black woman (Elle) undercover as a slave during the Civil War who falls for a white man (Malcolm) undercover as a Confederate soldier? Wow. I’m not trying to […]
America was born in the crucible of the civil war, and Ulysses Grant was the avatar for its renewed life.
This was a marvelous biography of an iconic American who’s life coincided with some of the most tumultuous and divisive events in American history. But I find myself struggling to review it. H.W. Brands doesn’t skimp on the details. His Ronald Regan biography tips the scales with more than 800 pages. His book on FDR is even more ambitious, being close to 900 pages – though, when you consider that FDR had nearly twice as much time in office as Regan, it may be said […]
In America the quirk was that people were things.
Social justice warrior alert: this was a really tough one, and also should be mandatory reading. I grew up in Canada, and stories about the American Civil War and the Underground Railroad have always been fairly romantic to me: good and caring citizens resisted the status quo and helped shuttle slaves from town to town until they were safely out of harm’s way in the North, often fabulous Canada where we were the cooler (haha) neighbor, and where former slaves could habeas their own damn […]