An illuminating portrait of a remarkable abolitionist working behind Union lines.
A debut biography recounts the travails of a relief agent during the Civil War.
As a relief agent for the Rochester Ladies’ Anti-Slavery Sewing Society, Julia Wilbur had a unique vantage point from which to view the Civil War. Fortunately for posterity, she kept a diary of her experiences providing services to freed slaves (or “contrabands”) in Alexandria, Virginia. And former Washington Post staff writer Whitacre puts that and other primary sources to great effect in her striking account of Wilbur’s life as a singular American woman during the turmoil of the second half of the 19th century. “By fighting for what she saw was just, often against those in positions of authority, she transformed herself into, in her own words, ‘a sort of missionary-at-large, a woman-of-all work,’ ” Whitacre writes. Wilbur was a schoolteacher in Rochester, New York, when she was first exposed to abolitionism by attending lectures given by Frederick Douglass. The slave-turned–orator and activist became part of Wilbur’s social circle, and his daughter was briefly a student at her school. By the fall of 1862, Wilbur needed a new purpose in life and used her abolitionist connections to secure the relief agent position behind the Union lines. Whitacre deftly depicts in telling detail not only the deplorable conditions to which freed slaves were subjected in Alexandria—at a hospital, “a mother sat holding her dead child, wrapped in a piece of ticking”—but also the racism and sexism of Union officials. Wilbur clashed repeatedly with the superintendent of contrabands, a Baptist minister named Albert Gladwin, who told her that she was “out of my sphere, & he does not like to see a woman wearing men’s clothes.” He was only removed from office after an outcry over his racist policy of burying black Union soldiers in the cemetery for civilian freedmen rather than with their military comrades. “Colored people are still treated like slaves in Alexandria, and the slave laws of the State are still enforced,” Wilbur lamented. In her engrossing book, Whitacre skillfully adds historical context to produce a well-rounded picture of a woman who found her purpose in battling “indifference and prejudice” and making a difference.
An illuminating portrait of a remarkable abolitionist working behind Union lines.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-61234-855-1
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Potomac Books
Review Posted Online: May 7, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2018
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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