Today when I set down The Underground Railroad after the final page, I crumpled. I had not experienced the overwhelm I expected to feel in each chapter while reading a book which I knew would text my limits of tolerance, but it all came in a wave at the end.
Though it wasn't the graphic nature of torture, but the weight and hopelessness of the whole enterprise of slavery which made me cry. I had been steeling myself against descriptions of personal injuries on the page, but it's the book's overall message about the institutionalized atrocities of slavery that walloped me as a reader there at the end.
I don't read reviews of books until after I read them, and here is much more than a review: this New Yorker Article talks about our attempts to rebrand the UR as a white institution that saved blacks. It properly contextualizes risk and heroism in the pre-Civil War south, and refers several times to Whitehead's book.
I think everyone should read this book.
Though it wasn't the graphic nature of torture, but the weight and hopelessness of the whole enterprise of slavery which made me cry. I had been steeling myself against descriptions of personal injuries on the page, but it's the book's overall message about the institutionalized atrocities of slavery that walloped me as a reader there at the end.I don't read reviews of books until after I read them, and here is much more than a review: this New Yorker Article talks about our attempts to rebrand the UR as a white institution that saved blacks. It properly contextualizes risk and heroism in the pre-Civil War south, and refers several times to Whitehead's book.
I think everyone should read this book.
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