A startling, well-researched slave narrative that seriously questions the intentions of our first president.
The story of a favored slave of the Washingtons who had the “impudence” to flee a life of benevolent servitude.
A runaway slave who happened to be among the household of the first president of the United States, Ona Judge Staines (1773-1848) shared her break for freedom nearly 50 years after the fact in an account in the May 1845 issue of the Granite Freeman. Dunbar (Black Studies and History/Univ. of Delaware; A Fragile Freedom: African American Women and Emancipation in the Antebellum City, 2008) unearthed an advertisement for the runaway slave and became determined to tell her story—and she tells it well. A “dower” slave—i.e., she was the property of Martha Washington’s first husband, Daniel Parke Custis—Ona was born in Mount Vernon, the product of a favored house seamstress, Betty, and a white indentured servant, Andrew Judge. At age 15, Ona, slender, fair of complexion, and a good seamstress, was chosen among the few household slaves out of hundreds to make the trek to the temporary capital of New York City, where Washington had just been sworn in as the new president of the nascent republic. She would mingle with the free blacks of the bustling city, and, later in Philadelphia, when the capital was moved there, she was responsible for over six years for Martha’s wardrobe, a role that relieved her of the drudgeries of kitchen and field work. In Philadelphia, there was a growing abolition movement, and when it was decided by the Washingtons that Ona was going to be given as a wedding present to the first lady’s objectionable granddaughter, Ona had had enough. On May 21, 1796, she slipped out of the executive mansion in Philadelphia, boarded a transport to New Hampshire (probably with help from the free black community), and started a new life there—but not without being hounded by Washington’s slave hunters.
A startling, well-researched slave narrative that seriously questions the intentions of our first president.Pub Date: Feb. 7, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-5011-2639-0
Page Count: 304
Publisher: 37 Ink/Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Nov. 22, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2016
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
PROFILES
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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