A Library of America Paperback Classic
Paperback, 544 pages
English language
Published July 14, 2010 by Library of America.
This unforgettable novel tells the story of Tom, a devoutly Christian slave who chooses not to escape bondage for fear of embarrassing his master. However, he is soon sold to a slave trader and sent down the Mississippi, where he must endure brutal treatment. This is a powerful tale of the extreme cruelties of slavery, as well as the price of loyalty and morality. When first published, it helped to solidify the anti-slavery sentiments of the North, and it remains today as the book that helped move a nation to civil war.
"So this is the little lady who made this big war." Abraham Lincoln's legendary comment upon meeting Mrs. Stowe has been seriously questioned, but few will deny that this work fed the passions and prejudices of countless numbers. If it did not "make" the Civil Warm, it flamed the embers. That Uncle Tom's Cabin is far more than …
This unforgettable novel tells the story of Tom, a devoutly Christian slave who chooses not to escape bondage for fear of embarrassing his master. However, he is soon sold to a slave trader and sent down the Mississippi, where he must endure brutal treatment. This is a powerful tale of the extreme cruelties of slavery, as well as the price of loyalty and morality. When first published, it helped to solidify the anti-slavery sentiments of the North, and it remains today as the book that helped move a nation to civil war.
"So this is the little lady who made this big war." Abraham Lincoln's legendary comment upon meeting Mrs. Stowe has been seriously questioned, but few will deny that this work fed the passions and prejudices of countless numbers. If it did not "make" the Civil Warm, it flamed the embers. That Uncle Tom's Cabin is far more than an outdated work of propaganda confounds literary criticism. The novel's overwhelming power and persuasion have outlived even the most severe of critics. As Professor John William Ward of Amherst College points out in his incisive Afterword, the dilemma posed by Mrs. Stowe is no less relevant today than it was in 1852: What is it to be "a moral human being"? Can such a person live in society -- any society? Commenting on the timeless significance of the book, Professor Ward writes: "Uncle Tom's Cabin is about slavery, but it is about slavery because the fatal weakness of the slave's condition is the extreme manifestation of the sickness of the general society, a society breaking up into discrete, atomistic individuals where human beings, white or black, can find no secure relation one with another. Mrs. Stowe was more radical than even those in the South who hated her could see. Uncle Tom's Cabin suggests no less than the simple and terrible possibility that society has no place in it for love." - Back cover.
It was very good, and very spiritual. It bordered on spiritual reading, I think. If you haven't read it, and think the term "Uncle Tom" is an euphemism for a turncoat slave or someone who betrayed their roots, that thought is dead wrong.
I feel like the primary reason this is thought is because of increased secularism and atheism in the world. If you are a Christian, everything the characters do makes 100% sense.
Really good story. However, the slave dialogue was a bit to get used to. Once that happened, I couldn't quit reading the book.
"Poor critters."
"Poor critters."
"Uncle Tom's Cabin" by Harriet Beecher Stowe is a rare novel. It was, after the Bible, the best selling book of the entire nineteenth century, and remains one of the few fictional works that can be said to have had a direct and appreciable impact on history. But perceptions of the novel and its reputation has often overshadowed the content of the novel. While I would not dismiss many contemporary criticisms of the book, including its portrayal of blacks as innately religious, I urge the reader to look past its stereotypes and saccharine sentimentality. The novel is immensely passionate and deeply affecting, even over one-hundred and fifty years since its first publication, and provides the reader with an unparallelled glimpse into the imaginative world of Antebellum America. I would recommend that any student of American history make the effort to get through the book - its worth the effort!
The benefits of Christianity, as described here, are so bountiful that one wonders how slavery dared to exist in its presence. The story is so replete with Jesus figures that the author has to juggle them carefully to avoid a scene where they must all sacrifice themselves en masse. The author is to be commended for restricting her anti-semitism to only a single line.
The religious morality is certainly laid on thick with a shovel, like many books of that period. Nonetheless, it's a book well worth reading, not least because of the global impact it had at the time. I can't say I was 100% a fan of the author's writing style, but it would be hard not to appreciate her sincerity, and the essential truths of the story (most of which was based on real incidents), and it's hard not to sympathize with some of the characters and get caught up in their lives and problems.
Overly simplistic sometimes and melodramatic always, but anyone who doesn't cry reading this book isn't human.
