Harriet Beecher Stowe Books

A compelling and highly readable indictment of slavery in America, "Dred" takes risks that "Uncle Tom's Cabin" did not. The ending of "Dred" is powerful and strong, unlike that of "Uncle Tom", which seemed to advocate ultimately that the slaves should be freed and encourged to return to Africa. Harriet Beecher Stowe is just as sharp in her criticism of the North and she is to the South. She is quick to condemn the passive profiteers of slavery as she is the slaveholder himself. I throughly enjoyed this book. I will read it a secod time.

While Uncle Tom's Cabin will likely remain Harriet Beecher Stowe's best known work, her 1856 novel Dred should not be overlooked. If you like this time period, you should like Dred. Stowe avoids the heavy-handed authorial commentary that characterizes Uncle Tom's Cabin; in other words, she lets the events of the story speak for themselves. The story is slow-burning plantation drama--again, if you're a fan of 19th century literature, you'll love Dred. Dred compares favorably to Moby-Dick, as both novels turn on gradual plots where the reader's bond to the characters becomes crucial. Because the plot takes awhile to develop, the true reward of the novel comes from watching the characters grow and evolve.

This edition features an introduction and notes by Robert Levine, which do a great job of placing Stowe's work in a historical context. Dred should appeal to students of 19th century literature, and anyone else with an interest in slavery and abolition.

This is a touching story of a boy whose mother abuses him during World War II. William is sent to live with a man named Tom, who lives in the country. As William slowely settles in he and Tom become the best of friends. Then one day he is sent back to his mother, who beats him and locks him in the cellar. Uncle Tom follows William and finds him and gets him to a hospital. They then get to live together. This is an exccelent book. I would reccomend it to EVERYONE!!!

_Goodbye to Uncle Tom_ is a nonfiction look at how American views of black people and slavery were shaped by _Uncle Tom's Cabin_---both the book itself, and the endless, increasingly low-rent plays derived from it. At one time "Tom-shows" were a large subset of the theater industry, since even the most pious folk could find very little to object to in going to one. They were a national institution until after World War One, and were only finally killed off by movies.

It's an interesting look at a little-known part of US social history, and I wish it were being re-printed.

When I ordered this book I didn't realize it would be so hard to read. I had always heard about this book but never read it, I still haven't. It has too much slang and half words in it. For as well known as it is I don't know how anybody read it. The story behind it is probably a very good story, but I couldn't understand enough of it to read more than the first chapter then it was placed on the book shelf. And I now know why it looks new and was sold as used, the fist purchaser probably couldn't read it either.

Wow! I must say this book is just...really amazing. I would reccomend it to anyone especially anyone who is studying the civil war or slavery in school.

right after lotr ttt. i think this book is awesome because it's got an engaging plot, with some "historial" references mixed in. if you're easily bored don't read the sermons where she begins with "dear reader/mother" and goes in to stir your pity. it's got a really fascinating ending and i'm just sad the real life cases never ended that way. read this if you're looking for something entertaining with historical background. no need to be studying history at all because i'm glad i read this even though i'm still in high school.

This particular book was recommended by a past professor that I consider my mentor. As I am studying to be a Professor of Literature, I thought surely this book would satisfy some of the historical questions I had about the plight of the negro slave. While the book can connect contemporary readers with knowledge of the antebellum south, the writing itself was way too pious. Stowe was the daughter, wife, and sister of preachers and it is easily seen in her writing. While the book has many redeeming qualities, it seems too much like a 700 page church sermon...NO THANKS. While it was good enough to finish it was still TOO tedious.

This book was incredible. Yes it can be racist, and extremist at times, but at it's core you're reading a piece of history. For a book to sell 300,000 copies during it's original publication in the mid 19th century is astounding. You're reading a book that had a part in the Civil War, the bloodiest war of our history. I did find while reading it that many parallels can be made between this book and "Black Beauty". Coincidence? Perhaps, but worth looking at in a review, or report. To read this and think that America permitted this slavery to go on for years, would be enough to disgust anyone. America's history is a bloody one, one that we need to remember, and reading this book will make you appriciate your freedom now, as an American. Please do keep in mind however, the slave trade is still going not to America, but places in Europe and Asia, even with the U.N outlawing it in 1953. I just cannot say how much this book made me think about the world past and present. Most highly recommended.

Due to time constraints and long drive to and from work/other places, I opted to listen to the audio instead of reading the book. This turned out to be a great decision! The audio was clear with deeply enriching array of voices for different characters that served to deepen entertainment and enrich vocabulary and pronunciation.

While the tracks are multiple [about 90 per CD]; they are short and easy to follow.

I would recommend this audio book for anyone who would benefit from auditory language stimulation, vocabulary enrichment and a good old entertainment. Bravo!

This CD collection is difficult to use. Book chapters are not identified on the lable or in individual CDs it is broken in to 30 second sound bites, which makes it easy to pause for a moment but difficult to find the begining of a chapter since the chapter may begin at 20 seconds in to the sound bite. Want to listen on your ipod good luck with hundreds of unnamed tracks. My students and I gave up and went back to the old audio tapes where we could find the chapter we wanted to listen to with out jugling 16 unlabled CDs

The book is a good story, not one I would choose if I were picking on my own. My son had to read it for school, however, the book on CD was a huge help.

I bought this book on CD for my son who is reading it in class. It really helps to comprehend the book when you have a really good reader like on these CDs. They had a good idea in cutting the chapters into 1 or 2 minute tracks, so you can easily skip ahead. Unfortunately, when you're trying to find the beginning of a chapter, it's almost impossible because they weren't careful to put the beginnings of chapters at the beginnings of tracks.

Being very interested in the abolitionist movement, and knowing how influential Harriet Beecher Stowe's novel was, I was really looking forward to reading it. However, it turned out to be something of a disappointment.

The story is rather engaging, following two sets of slaves: Uncle Tom, and Eliza and her son Harry, all three owned by Arthur Shelby (as well as Eliza's husband George, owned by a neighboring planter). Shelby is a rather benevolent slave-holder, but when he's forced to sell Tom and Harry to cancel his debts, Eliza decides to take Harry and run away rather than be separated from her son. Meanwhile, Eliza's husband George also resolves to escape north to Canada because of the malevolent cruelty of his own master. But Tom decides to allow himself to be sold south down the river rather than betray his beloved master Shelby.

Uncle Tom's Cabin is half anti-slavery propaganda and half Christian allegory. As propaganda, it is quite well-done, and in the service of a good cause, but artistically it is somewhat lacking. The author breaks the narrative to address the reader directly, a common practice through the nineteenth century as the novel was still a relatively new art form, but with a frequency I've never encountered in other novels of the period. This has the effect of destroying the continuity of the story. Her method is to write about something horrible that happens to the slave characters in her story, then put it to the reader directly how they'd feel if such a thing were done to them--an effective propaganda technique, but not exactly subtle. This is especially prevalant during the first half of the novel, which focuses on the story of Eliza, George, and Harry.

The second half of the novel turns into Christian allegory, as Uncle Tom, our trusty Jesus figure, allows himself to be flogged to death rather than revenge or even defend himself by killing his cruel new master and escaping, for the purpose of redeeming his fellow slaves by covering for two who *are* trying to escape and setting a Christian example of love and forgiveness for the rest.

So the message basically seems to be for slaves, if they're to be fully Christian and virtuous, to let themselves be treated as horribly as their master whims, and take it meekly. How is this abolitionist? It was certainly a shock after being used to reading the much more intellectual and more passionate writings of Frederick Douglass, who advised his fellow slaves not only to escape, but to kill their masters in self-defense first if possible.

The most interesting character, Eliza's husband George, at first sets out for Canada with a brilliant and daring scheme and the full intention of defending himself if anyone tries to capture him and take him back. Luckily, he's taken in by the Quakers before he has to seriously hurt anyone, but Stowe's emphasis on Christian submission makes for less dramatic material, since she won't allow the conflict to be expressed in terms of physical violence, or rather, she will, but only one-sidedly. But perhaps all this is precisely what one might have expected from a sister of the Reverend Henry Ward Beecher.

Buck Schirner, whom I had heard before reading Terry Goodkind's Blood of the Fold, is excellent here, bringing a lot of emotion to the characters through his rendering of their dialogue. If you want to read mid-nineteenth century abolitionist material, read Frederick Douglass, but if you do decide to read this too, this audiobook version narrated by Buck Schirner will help it go down easier.

The copy I received of the Norton Critical Edition was missing pages 111-142. Instead, pages 79-110 were repeated. I contacted Amazon but they said it was too late to get my money back. My advice is to count all the pages in all books your order from Amazon, and don't buy the Norton Critical Edition of Uncle Tom's cabin. Buy the book from another publisher instead.

I realized recently that I had never read this important novel in my younger years, so I took it up as an adult.

This book should not be judged as a work of literature, but as an intensely political novel, a polemic against slavery. Stowe steps out of the novel from time to time, for example, to express her hatred of slavery and of the slave trade, and to call upon all Christians to act to abolish slavery. As a polemic, it is masterful, and its shortcomings as a novel (too many coincidences, excessive sentimentality, some fairly wooden characters) fade away in the reader's mind.

This is a period piece, a work of its time, and Stowe is not free from attitudes that we would term racist today. She holds many stereotypes of black people -- they are more emotional, more susceptible to religious belief, less cultured -- while at the same time declaring that slavery is the worst evil known to man. Interestingly, Stowe is as tough on Northerners who tolerate slavery or benefit from it as she is on Southerners who keep slaves.

Highly recommended to Americans of all ages and ethnic backgrounds.

The Book, Uncle Tom's Cabin, when first published, took in an amount of 10,000 dollars to the Author, Harriet Beecher Stowe. This was believed to be the largest sum of money to any author from a sale of a single book produced in such a short period of time.
Stowe has the skill in describing her characters. There is no book, in which a Negro's life had been portrayed so life-like such as this way. Uncle Tom and Eliza's fate is the interest in this story, for they are somewhat heroes of slave times.
The opening is a deal of slaves, to a slave proprietor with no feeling whatsoever. Haley is making a bargain with a nice caring slaveholder, Shelby, who is in major debt. Haley is a villain and wants these slaves all for himself. Because there is no federal law which can compel the slave states to resign the "property" which they hold. These states are as free to maintain slavery, as are the states of the North who rid themselves of this scandal.
With Stowe describing these characters feelings, it feels like she is going right along with them on their journeys to freedom and deeper into slavery. There is a feeling there, while reading, which no one can describe. It is a shame that Stowe does not know how she excites her reader's passion towards all these characters, and how Uncle Tom's Cabin is now known as a classic.

This version of Stowe's classic text includes reproductions of orginal historical documents at the back, literary criticism of the text, and some of the original illustrations. The book is well-made, stands up to the stress of reading (paper is thin but not too thin, like some anthologies).

As for the text-- this is the book that some say caused Abraham Lincoln to write the Emancipation Proclamation. An "Uncle Tom" has come to mean a black person who sells out to the white system-- but in so many ways, that is not at all what Uncle Tom does in the book. Stowe wrote the book to change what she saw as an unjust system, an evil system-- and at times, the text is very didactic (teacherly) and very preachy about religion. It's a fine "sentimental" book-- and a fine historical document. It's also a pretty good story. Yes, there are some places where we could just get a tooth ache from the syrup of the overly dramatized scenes (you'll see when you read about Little Eva). But it's a certain style of writing that accomplished Stowe's goal of getting the women who may not have owned slaves but who benefitted from the system (white, northern, wealthy ones) to realize the problems and move to CHANGE them.

Much of what people think about Uncle Tom's Cabin actually comes from the later "Tom shows" that travelled the country-- the minstrel reviews that were not very flattering either to blacks or to Stowe's original texts. Read the book that has everyone all stirred up and make your own judgements. You might not like it-- but don't let someone else make the decision for you.

Uncle Tom is probably the most important single book written in the United States of America. No one is really familiar with American culture, literature, relgion, and history if she or he has not read Uncle Tom.

To understand this book, I would urge people to consult Eric J. Sundquist's book New Essays on Uncle Tom's Cabin (The American Novel) and Jane Tompkin's Sensational Designs. The 19th Century world and reader that Stowe aimed at read and understood things so differently, that you will miss much without knowing how to look at this book the way Stowe wrote to them and the way they read.

This book has a broad purpose: literary to decide what is wrong with the entire world and present an answer. If you follow the sweep of the book you will find Stowe takes on everything from whether the issues of the 1848 revolutions can be resolved on the side of Democracy, to the question of marital relations amogn the free and the white. The issue of slavery is not the book's only focus. It is, in fact, the solution.

Stowe's real thesis here is that American Chattel slavery is the number one evil in the world, that this evil corrupts every institution in society North and South and corrupts far beyond the borders of the United States, and that no compromise with it or avoidance of it is possible.

To Stowe, slavery is an abomination not just because of the cruelty, savagery, exploitation, and degradation involved, but above all, it is an abomination against God, the most unChrist-like behavior possible.

Thus the relgious solution she offers is to become more Christlike in your opposition to slavery and to finally undergrow the Christic experience of dying for your sins and being reborn in Jesus Christ. That's right, in Stowe's time evangelical Christianity, rather than being a fob for right-wing politics, was practiced by some of the militant and serious opponents of slavery.

Stowe creates figures that are Christlike who like Christ die rather than yield to sin and influence the others in their faith. The supreme figure is of course Uncle Tom. Uncle Tom, as a a pejorative, comes not from this novel, but from the Tom shows that blossomed in the late 19th century which were a presentation of a mock version of this story with racist minstrel like charicatures of the African American characters.

In this book, Uncle Tom is a physically majestic, heroic, dignified person, whose faith and dignity are never corrupted, whose death is shown as a parallel to that of Christ in the resurrection of the souls of all around him required to eliminate Slavery. If he is passive, never disobeys his masters, and seems to have not much of a material interest of his own in life, it is because to Stowe this a reflection of his Christic nature.

No doubt at best Stowe sees him as a "noble savage" at Best. There is no doubt if one reads this book and even more clearly STowe's Key to Uncle Tom's Cabin which provided documentation for this book's depiction of slavery, that it is clear that Stowe did not believe African Americans were equal to whites. Her then-current immigrationist views are expressed in the way the one intelligent independently acting Black couple presented here leave the US for Canada once they escape slavery.

Yet, this book accomplished the purpose it had. It galvanized millions of Americans and more millions around the world to dramatically oppose slavery. Uncle Tom was one of the first true international best sellers. In a smaller country, where literacy was lower, and when many people bought books through private libraries where families shared books and the book was often read to family gatherings rather than by one person, Uncle Tom sold two hundred thousand copies in its first year and sold a million copies between its publication and the civil war.

Stowe was honest in her afterward and in other writings to say that her description of slavery in Uncle Tom is much prettier and more nicer than slavery was. She believed an accurate depiction of slavery--Stowe had lived in Cincinatti on the board with slaving Kentucky and traveled through the South--would be so revolting that her target audience of Northern whites would not read this book.

Her book launched a torrent of responses from white southerners as could be expected. However, the popularity of her book encouraged white authors, but especially Black authors to write antislavery books that responded to Stowe. Some of the foundations of Black American literature by authors like Frederick Douglass, William Wells Brown, Harriet Jacobs, and Martin Delany are essentially response to Uncle Tom.

Perhaps the most dramatic is Delany's Blake or the Huts of America whose character is a double to Uncle Tom. However, Delany's hero does not submit to being sold "down the river." He instead runs away and travels throughout the US following the same course as the travels in Uncle Tom showing how slave conditions are so much worse than Stowe showed. Finished with that business, Blake leaves the United States for Cuba where he becomes part of a group of Afro-Cubans unwilling to suffer like Christ and Uncle Tom. Like the current leaders of Cuba, they start to organize an international revolution of Slaves and the oppressed!

I loved this book! It really opened my eyes about the way women were able to act politically in an age when they could not vote. Pierson tells great stories about the way reformers tried to change the system. He looks at many newspaper and fictional sources, showing us how the stories that people read every day shaped their perceptions of family, and the roles of men and women. These perceptions about northern life also shaped the way people looked at slavery, as a system to be abolished. The section on Jessie Benton Fremont was great -- a fantastic lady that I had never heard of -- but who could have been first lady. This book is also thoroughly researched, with a wide-ranging source base that shows us innovative ways to interpet evidence about the past.

A clear and comprehensive account of how political parties are always out to get your vote by pushing your hottest buttons. This book shows how northern politicians before the Civil War tried to win over voters by appealing to their best and worst instincts about what men and women ought to be doing and how families should work. The section on Mary Todd Lincoln and the 1860 campaign is great, and the Democrats are so piggish! It's scholarly, but also funny at times.

I gave him more than 1 star because I think that a lot of good time and research went into this book. It was a subject that interested me originally, but by about page 80 I was sick of it. Mostly it is an account of Northern women before the Civil War, and how the woman's rights movement corresponded with the anti-slavery movement (for how can a woman urge emancipation for herself without feeling bad for others as well). Sounds interesting enough. That's why I bought it. I was wrong. There were a lot of quotes from Uncle Tom's Cabin and I started to think that if I wanted Harriet Beecher Stowe's comments about anti-slavery politics than I would read her books (the author goes on to quote another one of her books, Dred). There would be no reason to read or purchase this book unless it was to aid your research about the role of gender in the 1850s. Otherwise I recommend to stay away and read something with more personality so as to not bore you.

I read this novel for the purpose of completeing a summer assignment for my AP US history Class. It had a decnet plotline and is by the obviously reputable Stowe. A very interesting historical novel that kept me entertained enough to finish and wirte a paper about. Focuses on slavery in new england and the love between a minister and the daughter of the woman with whom he is residing.

The Minister's Wooing is the first of Harriet Beecher Stowe's three great novels of New England religion, that weave scenes and folklore of New England life with the debates and religious agonies that led her from her father's Edwardsian revivalist Calvinism to evangelical Episcopalianism. Of the three, The Minister's Wooing is the most satisfying as a story, although Oldtown Folks and Poganuc People give a fuller panorama of old New England life. (David Hackett Fischer used them extensively in his social history of the American colonies, Albion's Seed.) Mrs. Stowe improved her style greatly after Uncle Tom's Cabin which, while powerful as a moral indictment of slavery, is rather poorly written in many passages.

In her New England novels, Mrs. Stowe looks back on her childhood world in Puritan New England, justifying both her desertion of some of its most tightly-held tenets and the high honor she continued to pay to its legacy. To claim that she satirizes Calvinism is a grotesque misreading, sadly typical of most introductions to her novels which desire to place her as a forbearer of secular feminism and social radicalism, rather than let her be what in fact she was, an evangelical, a Republican, and an ardent advocate of the Christianization of American society.

The Minister's Wooing is set around 1798-1800 in Newport, Rhode Island, at a time just after the American Revolution. Real historical characters in the novel include Samuel Hopkins and Aaron Burr, Jr., leading pupil and grandson, respectively, of the great theologian Jonathan Edwards. While the author freely changes events in these characters' lives (Hopkins, for example, had been a foe of slavery and the slave-trade since 1776, long before the novel's time), her interpretation of these characters, both of whom she had met growing up, is insightful.

Mrs. Stowe contrasts the culturally spare and logocentric world of early New England with the visual opulence which she inhabited in genteel America of the mid-nineteenth century. How to relate the insular New England Christianity of her childhood to the Christianity of Raphael, and the great cathedrals of Europe she visited as an adult? This theme is introduced both in her narrative voice (St. Augustine's Enchiridion of Faith, Love, and Hope is cited without name at the novel's turning point) and in the character of Mme de Frontignac, a French aristocratic woman in an unhappy marriage. She introduces the New England matrons to the feminine beauty of France yet finds balm for her wounds in the severe virtues of Protestant New England. Clothe the chaste Protestant New England spirit in a elegant French Catholic gentility, Mrs. Stowe seems to be saying.

The theological groundwork is made more explicit in Oldtown Folks, but briefly, Mrs. Stowe believed that Jonathan Edwards, with his impossibly high standards for Christian life and his revivalist focus on a dramatic conversion experience, knocked the motherly old Puritan consensus exemplified by Cotton Mather's Magnalia Christi Americana off kilter and created almost unbearable tensions in many New Englanders. Who can be saved? What was the use of anything in a world where only an infinitesimal number could escape hell? How can we bear the thought of loving God who seems to condemn so many of our own flesh and blood to eternal damnation? Wrestling with these questions paradoxically gave the Yankees energy as they burst their cocoon, trading in China, fighting the Revolution, and allying with France. Some, like Aaron Burr, Jr., responded by embracing the skepticism of the philosophes. Others like James Marvyn's mother slowly expire, tormented by antinomies they can't resolve and unable to find the Gospel of Christ's love in the mazes of predestination. Some, like the deliciously nasty Simeon Brown, use the logical intricacies of Calvinist theology to cover up their utterly unconverted heart.

Mrs. Stowe's own answer is given in part by the exemplary character of Mary Scudder (whose role is taken by Harry Percival in Oldtown Folks), and in part by the Gospel wisdom of the black slave Candace. Mrs. Stowe's answer seems contradictory: in Mary Scudder she says children raised in a truly Christian society (as New England was and America must be) are born not depraved but naturally Christian and saved. In Candace, however, she points to the harder but more believable good news that Christ died for and loves even real sinners. Tragically Mrs. Stowe, like New England theologians generally, ingnored Holy Baptism as God's objective Gospel sign showing His good will toward the little children. Thus she ironically sought comfort and assurance through the image of Mary Scudder in the same impossible ideal of purely holy living that in Jonathan Edwards' hands had begun the madness.

Finally, Mrs. Stowe recasts the theological question of grace and nature into a meditation on the relation between familial (romantic, filial, and parental) love and love of God. Despite her sympathies with Catholicism, Mrs. Stowe firmly sets aside the monastic ideal that sees family love as in competition with love of God. Instead she sees the former as the true stepping stone to the latter. God planted in our hearts this bond of love to our families, even for those who we fear are rejecting Him, because it is this human love that leads us to Him. For Mrs. Stowe, the Christian home is truly God's school of character; desecration of that school is veritable blasphemy.

If all this sounds rather too thoughtful and theological, this is, as Mrs. Stowe states, the problem with old New England. It was born and conceived in theology and a novel true to that ethos must itself be thoughtful and theological. There is humor here, sudden plot turns, pathos, shrewd observation of character, and lovely description of North American nature, but the heart of the novel is a theology of love, divine and human.

I had to read this book for a Neglected Novels of the 19th century class. Stowe's examination into the problems of calvinism and the role of women in American society are insightful. Stowe's prose is entertianing and clear, but can be a bit droning, especially if the reader isn't acquainted with the style of 19th century novels. Overall I'd recomend this book to anyone who enjoys 19th century Lit.

This is a really good book. I think all children should have this book in their possession. If they don't, parents you need to buy it.

I chose this book to read was because I was suppose to read a historical fiction, but the reason that I chose this book out of all the other historical fiction books because it seemed to remind me of Abe Lincoln cabin.
The book is about slavery. The way that the author described time of slavery back and how everything there was so terrible. It makes me so glad that I live in this time now in this country. I wish that there were more that the black people could do instead of being treated like that. It was like time travel, when I
Reason why I liked it because it showed slavery from and black mans perspective and how slavery was for them. I didn't like was all the horrifying details it goes into slavery. Reason why I choose that book was because it's a good book about slavery and it shows you what really goes on in that time. It was like time travel, when I began to read it was boring, then it seemed that I was sent back in time and seeing the way that they were treated.

Hummingbirds! I would have never thought of them as some kind of ambiguous stand-in for a number of concerns of the period (marital infidelity or bliss, abolitionist arguments of freedom, a hint of tea totaling or the pleasures of a sumptuous life) but I'm sure I'll see them everywhere now.

Benfey provides you with a paragraph or so of Twain, a few stanzas of Dickinson, a painting of Heade and then composes fascinating readings, sensitive of them by combining close analysis and historical detail. His pleasure and enjoyment of these authors and artists is palpable and contagious.

I really appreciate the way this book resists the common urge to treat Dickinson's biography as freakish (the white dresses, the recklessness, etc.). Benfey calls her a "stay-at-home visionary" and points out that "by April 1882, Dickinson could have published a volume of her poems had she wished to do so."

One of my favorite aspects of this book is the way it makes moments of the nineteenth century seem so close to our own experience. Benfey ends a description of the "hotel-world" that Henry Flagler creates: "Guests arrived at the resort in luxury railroad cars designed by Flagler, bearing the same yellow trim--`Flagler Yellow'--as the arches and windows of the hotel. The transition between railroad and hotel was seamless..." Doesn't that just sound like the branded, constructed trip one would get from, say Disney?

The overall symbol of the hummingbird to describe how America was changing from a staid worldview to a more transient, evanescent one in the Civil and post Civil War period is probably insightful. The author also gives us some biographical details not well known about well known luminaries (and people who would become luminaries) of that period. HOWEVER, his writing is pedestrian and I found the book quite a slog. I'm a huge fan of Emily Dickinson(who knew?) and an admirer of Mark Twain, et al. So, I persevered; but I kept thinking about how dull this English professor's classes must be, despite the interesting subject matter.

I don't think this book would capture/retain the interest of the general reader.

Harriet Beecher Stowe was a woman who was credited as starting the civil war, and this book portrays her as so. It reads almost like a fiction book, but it stays true to her life. Norma Johnston does a superb work in re-telling the life and works of Stowe, and it is a very good book for any young adult researching Harriet Beecher Stowe or the Beecher Family.