@ PDF Ebook Counting My Chickens . . .: And Other Home Thoughts, by The Duchess of Devonshire

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A unique window on an extraordinary life lived with tremendous zest, discrimination, and intelligence

The Duchess of Devonshire is the youngest of the Mitford siblings, the famous brood that includes the writers Nancy and Jessica. Like them, she has lived an unusually full and remarkable life, and like them she has an inimitable expressive gift. In Counting My Chickens, she has gathered extracts from her diaries and other writings to create a multifaceted portrait of her life at Chatsworth, the home of the Dukes of Devonshire, that is pithy, hilarious, wise, and always richly rewarding.

Under the Duchess's inspired supervision, Chatsworth has become one of England's most frequently visited great houses, welcoming over 400,000 visitors a year. The Duchess reveals what it takes to keep such an establishment alive and prospering, tells of transporting a goat by train from the Scottish island of Mull to London, discusses having her portrait painted by Lucian Freud, and provides rich reminisces of growing up a Mitford--along with telling anecdotes about friends from Evelyn Waugh to John F. Kennedy. From Tom Stoppard's adoring Introduction to the author's meditation on the beauty of Elvis Presley's voice, COUNTING MY CHICKENS offers continuous surprise and delight.

• Sales Rank: #444089 in Books
• Published on: 2002-10-15
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Dimensions: 9.40" h x .79" w x 4.46" l, .65 pounds
• Binding: Hardcover
• 208 pages

From Publishers Weekly
The duchess of Devonshire, youngest of the famous Mitford siblings, is best known for Chatsworth, her historic Derbyshire home, which she keeps open for more than 400,000 visitors each year. Unlike sisters Nancy or Jessica, the duchess is probably a better estate manager than a writer as Stoppard puts it, as "a literary moll, the Duchess is a hoot." This slim volume collects many previously published pieces, however, some of the works are not readily available to American readers (e.g., the British Goat Society Yearbook). Some dwell on the idiocies of modern life: impenetrable packaging, incomprehensible remote control devices for televisions and the ubiquity of consultants. A few revisit Mitford family history, the best being Deborah's account of bringing her goat from the Hebrides to sister Nancy's house in London in 1939, while others discuss obscure British writers. It's when she comes to livestock and gardens that the duchess hits her stride. Her description of the "five stages of gardening" is hilarious: people "begin by liking flowers, progress to flowering shrubs, then autumn foliage and berries; next they go for leaves, and finally the underneaths of leaves." While many of the duchess's pronouncements incite reactionary sentiments e.g., she'd "do away with" women "who want to join men's clubs" and "female weather forecasters," and she'd like to bring back "housewives" and "nurses in uniform" American readers, at least, may find it camp rather than offensive. Reading the duchess is a bit like visiting an old aunt: you swallow the dreary bits politely, knowing there will be a few delightful morsels when you least expect them.
Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

From Booklist
There is charm here, but it depends on how you respond tosentences such as, "In the 1930s, my parents bought a small island offthe coast of Mull." The duchess is the youngest of the Mitfords, Nancyand Jessica's baby sister. Chatsworth, her family estate, is athriving tourist destination as well as the place where shelives. Borrowing from writings, diaries, and letters, and carefullyfootnoting each person mentioned (Uncle Harold is Harold Macmillan),she decries environmentalists, feminists, and consultants. However,she writes lightly but amusingly about what it takes to make a statelyhome attractive (toilets and a good shop); the glories of a Camelliajaponica Alba Plena that has bloomed at Chatsworth since the 1840s;and how she got a goat from the Hebrides to her sister Nancy's housein London. Her opening page, about how hard it is to start a bookproperly, is worth the price of admission. GraceAnne DeCandido
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Review
"[Counting My Chickens] is more entertaining than anything I could say about it." --P.J. Kavanaugh, The Spectator

"Many distinguished people have known the pleasures of a ducal weekend at Chatsworth--not least Sir Tom Stoppard, who has provided an affectionate introduction. For those of us less fortunate, this charming collection of family stories, portraits of friends, thoughts on this and that, and snapshots of life at the great house is the next best thing. The tales of the Duchess's Mitford childhood come wonderfully fresh-minted . . . 'just the entertainment for a winter's night.'" --Christopher Matthew, The Daily Mail (London)

Most helpful customer reviews

24 of 24 people found the following review helpful.
A Small Jewel From the Last Mitford Girl
By John D. Cofield
Counting My Chickens is a collection of newspaper and magazine columns by Deborah Freeman-Mitford Cavendish, the Dowager Duchess of Devonshire. "Debo" is the youngest and only surviving Mitford Girl, the fabulous daughters of Lord and Lady Redesdale who scandalized and delighted the British and the world from the 1930s onward.

Although this is a very short book cut into many small, fairly unconnected segments, there is nevertheless much that charms. The celebrated Mitford wit,most clearly displayed by Debo's sisters Nancy and Jessica, is in evidence, particularly in the sections that deal with Debo's childhood and early adult years (she once traveled by train from Scotland with a goat, milking it in first class waiting rooms on the way.)

Also in evidence is the extraordinariness of Debo's life as wife of a Duke and as chatelaine of one of England's great mansions, Chatsworth House. She casually drops names like Harold Macmillan and John Kennedy (both of whom were indirectly related to her husband) and at the same time records some of the merriments and aggravations that come with having your home on display to tourists several months each year. Occasionally Debo will drop a barbed comment or two on the silliness of some politicians and visitors, but for the most part she is soft spoken and accomodating.

Few Duchesses have written or revealed much about their lives, so its nice that one has done so now, at a time when the House of Lords is being democratized and the aristocracy must seem more anachronistic than ever.

21 of 21 people found the following review helpful.
Last chaper was the best
By A reader
I've given this book only four stars because it wasn't long enough! I would have liked to read more about her childhood from her point of view. Nancy's stories about it were from another vantage since she was 16 when Deborah was born.
I wasn't bored by this book at all. Have been reading about the Mitfords this summer and fall and am interested in their way of life which is so different than mine.
I don't mind the footnotes telling who people are. Some I knew, others I had never heard of. I didn't think the use of footnotes was excessive, but then I read a lot of books that have footnotes so am not concerned about them.
The Duchess has been very successful with managing Chatsworth House and I admire her for that. Her wit and wisdom come through as she writes matter-of-factly about her life. She doesn't sound stuffy at all. I wish I could visit Chatsworth and meet her.

0 of 0 people found the following review helpful.
Wonderful! What a delightful and beautiful book
By Xerlan J. Deery
Counting My Chickens... and Other Home Thoughts Wonderful! What a delightful and beautiful book. Such wisdom and sass!

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~~ PDF Ebook Each Man in His Time: The Life Story of a Director, by Raoul Walsh

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The Life Story of a Director

• Sales Rank: #818014 in Books
• Brand: Farrar, Straus & Giroux
• Published on: 1974
• Ingredients: Example Ingredients
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 385 pages

Most helpful customer reviews

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? Free PDF The Fame Lunches: On Wounded Icons, Money, Sex, the Brontës, and the Importance of Handbags, by Daphne Merkin

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A wide-ranging collection of essays by one of America's most perceptive critics of popular and literary culture

From one of America's most insightful and independent-minded critics comes a remarkable new collection of essays, her first in more than fifteen years. Daphne Merkin brings her signature combination of wit, candor, and penetrating intelligence to a wide array of subjects that touch on every aspect of contemporary culture, from the high calling of the literary life to the poignant underside of celebrity to our collective fixation on fame. "Sometimes it seems to me that the private life no longer suffices for many of us," she writes, "that if we are not observed by others doing glamorous things, we might as well not exist."
Merkin's elegant, widely admired profiles go beneath the glossy façades of neon-lit personalities to consider their vulnerabilities and demons, as well as their enduring hold on us. As her title essay explains, she writes in order "to save myself through saving wounded icons . . . Famous people . . . who required my intervention on their behalf because only I understood the desolation that drove them." Here one will encounter a gallery of complex, unforgettable women―Marilyn Monroe, Courtney Love, Diane Keaton, and Cate Blanchett, among others―as well as such intriguing male figures as Michael Jackson, Mike Tyson, Truman Capote, and Richard Burton. Merkin reflects with empathy and discernment on what makes them run―and what makes them stumble.
Drawing upon her many years as a book critic, Merkin also offers reflections on writers as varied as Jean Rhys, W. G. Sebald, John Updike, and Alice Munro. She considers the vexed legacy of feminism after Betty Friedan, Bruno Bettelheim's tarnished reputation as a healer, and the reenvisioning of Freud by the elusive Adam Phillips.
Most of all, though, Merkin is a writer who is not afraid to implicate herself as a participant in our consumerist and overstimulated culture. Whether ruminating upon the subtext of lip gloss, detailing the vicissitudes of a pre–Yom Kippur pedicure, or arguing against our obsession with household pets, Merkin helps makes sense of our collective impulses. From a brazenly honest and deeply empathic observer, The Fame Lunches shines a light on truths we often prefer to keep veiled―and in doing so opens up the conversation for all of us.

• Sales Rank: #807802 in Books
• Brand: Merkin, Daphne
• Published on: 2014-09-02
• Released on: 2014-09-02
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Dimensions: 9.24" h x 1.36" w x 6.22" l, 1.00 pounds
• Binding: Hardcover
• 416 pages

Review

“Precise, pointed. . . . Together, these essays . . . showcase a fearless intelligence. . . . Merkin addresses more complicated issues, or at least ones calling for either honest self-examination or subtlety. . . . These are stunning works, enough to hold us for at least another decade.” ―Clea Simon, The Boston Globe

“[Merkin] writes like an angel, whatever the subject.” ―Editor's Choice, Buffalo News

“Unfailingly intelligent.” ―Heller McAlprin, NPR

“Outstanding . . . one of our best narrative nonfiction writers. Merkin's voice is secular and modern and yet filled with some sort of ancient wisdom, and coupled with intellectual and emotional honesty, while maintaining a pureness of heart. That is no easy feat.” ―Elaine Margolin, Jewish Journal

“A diverse array of work . . . The keenly perceptive Merkin adroitly tackles high and low culture . . . refreshingly candid . . . . No matter what topic, readers will be treated to mesmerizing prose, lively wit, and penetrating analysis; the collection is a joy to read.” ―Publishers Weekly (starred, boxed review)

“An eclectic collection of pieces, all of which feature her unique style and voice . . . . Merkin's style is inevitably exploratory--these are ‘essays' in the word's literal sense. Like Montaigne, she writes to figure something out, not because she's already figured it out . . . Essays that go down like candy but nourish like health food.” ―Kirkus Reviews

“Fearless, impolitic, honest, darkly observant, these superb essays tell all of our secrets.” ―Katie Roiphe

“Daphne Merkin is one of the smartest and best readers I know--not only of books (about which she writes peerlessly) but of people and their preoccupations. She is fiercely honest, even when she turns her unflinching eye on herself, and has such range and such an uncanny ability to draw connections that her essays leave you enlightened about things you never knew you cared about.” ―Chip McGrath

“Daphne Merkin's voice is unmistakable in its wit and audacity and undertone of melancholy. The essay form is a perfect medium for her delicious arias.” ―Janet Malcolm

“Daphne Merkin puts the mark of her distinctive style--intellectual and literary--on everything she writes about, from Kabbalah to camp. This is the juiciest collection of cultural criticism to come along in quite a while and establishes her as a unique and major essayist.” ―Phyllis Rose

“The Fame Lunches is nothing short of a great read. It's filled with unexpected insights into the Complexity, Sorrow, and Beauty of my favorite subject: Women. Everything Daphne Merkin touches glows in the light of her shining talent.” ―Diane Keaton

“Daphne Merkin's sparkling and unreasonably informed essays are about fame, yes, and lunches, somewhat. Above all, they are strikingly original takes on the human condition.” ―Woody Allen

“The Fame Lunches is a delicious and delightful feast. What a pleasure to read a writer who can use language with joy and inventiveness. Daphne Merkin has taken the essay form back to its roots in Michel Montaigne, Joseph Addison, Richard Steele, and Samuel Johnson. Her range is vast, her intellect inspiring. Whether you agree with her conclusions or not, watching her mind work is a thing of beauty.” ―Erica Jong, author of Seducing the Demon: Writing for My Life

“Everything Daphne Merkin writes is so smart, it shines.” ―The Washington Post Book World on Daphne Merkin

“One of the few contemporary essayists who have (and deserve) a following.” ―New York Magazine on Daphne Merkin

About the Author

Daphne Merkin, a former staff writer for The New Yorker, is a regular contributor to ELLE. Her writing frequently appears in The New York Times, Bookforum, Departures, Travel + Leisure, W, Vogue, and other publications. Merkin has taught writing at the 92nd Street Y, Marymount, and Hunter College. Her previous books include Enchantment, a novel, and Dreaming of Hitler, a collection of essays. She lives in New York City.

Most helpful customer reviews

9 of 9 people found the following review helpful.
it is nice to have them
By Lucubrator
It's been a long time since her last collection. While I've read a number of the essays gathered in this book in several magazines, it is nice to have them, and the ones that got away, in a beautiful hardbound collection. Personally, I love Ms. Merkin's voice--incisive, intelligent, empathetic, self-scrutinizing, and gently mocking. Her range of literary, historical, and psychological knowledge is wide and subtlety conveyed. I find reading her pieces like being in the company of smart, funny, and generous friend. Really enjoyed her profiles of Alice Munro and Diane Keaton, as well as her unflinching and honest takes on money and fame.

16 of 20 people found the following review helpful.
She's the queen of oversharing --- and that's good news for her readers.
By Jesse Kornbluth
Daphne Merkin is frighteningly intelligent. You only have to read a few paragraphs of her writing to know that she’s read, heard and seen everything written, recorded and filmed, and that, for good measure, she has a point of view about her subject that is dramatically different from every other writer. But Daphne Merkin is not only deeply smart, she is deeply troubled. She’s the queen of Too Much Information, though in her case the oversharing is the point.

She was, she tells us, born into a family of casually Orthodox Jews. They Merkins were rich — they lived in a Park Avenue duplex, they had a house staff — but money somehow didn’t seem plentiful. Her father was successful and distant. She could never get close to her mother; young Daphne had a “sense of not having been loved — or, to put it more precisely, responded to in a way that felt like love.” At 5, she began “to be apprehensive about what lay in wait for me.” At 8, she was “wholly unwilling to attend school, out of some combination of fear and separation anxiety.”

But she could write. Lord, could she write. When she was 21, she reviewed a book by Jane Bowles. Woody Allen wrote her a fan letter: “You’re wasting your gifts on reviewing.” They became friends. Many years later, over lunch, she told him she felt more depressed than usual. With that, as she writes in this collection of pieces, the interrogation began:

"How depressed? he immediately wanted to know. Quite depressed, I said. Did I have trouble getting up in the morning? Lots, I answered. Did I ever stay in bed all day? No, I said, but it was often noon before I got out of my nightgown. But of course I continued to write, he said. I answered that I hadn’t written a word in weeks. He looked quite serious and then gently asked me if I had ever thought about trying shock therapy. Shock therapy? Yes, he said, he knew a friend — a famous friend — for whom it had been quite helpful. Maybe I should try it.

Sure, I said. Thanks. I don’t know what I had been hoping for — some version of come with me and I will cuddle you until your sadness goes away, not go get yourself hooked up to electrodes, baby — but I was slightly stunned. More than slightly. I understood that he was trying to be helpful in his way, but it fell so far short. We shook hands on Madison Avenue and then gave each other a polite peck, as we always did. It was sunny and cool as I made my way home, looking in at the windows full of bright summer dresses. Shock therapy? It wasn’t as though I hadn’t heard of it or didn’t know people who had benefited from it. Still, how on earth did he conceive of me? As a chronic mental patient, someone who was meant to sit on a thin hospital mattress and stare grayly into space? Didn’t he know I was a writer with a future, a person given to creative descriptions of her own moods? Shock therapy, indeed; I’d sooner try a spa.

It suddenly occurred to me, as I walked up Madison Avenue, that it might pay to be resilient, if this was all being vulnerable and skinless got you. People didn’t stop and cluck over the damage done unless you made it worth their while. Indeed, maybe it was time to rethink this whole salvation business. Or maybe I was less desperate, less teetering on the edge, than I cared to admit. Now, that was a refreshing possibility."

Now that I’ve suggested the psychological terrain — and these are just the top notes, expressed as vulgar journalism — what about “The Fame Lunches: On Wounded Icons, Money, Sex, the Brontës, and the Importance of Handbags,” Daphne Merkin’s new collection of essays? There are 45 of them, and the topics are, as they say, wide-ranging.

Merkin is extremely conscious of surface appearance, especially her weight, so there’s an essay called “In My Head I’m Always Thin.” “Our Money, Ourselves” tracks her family’s public philanthropy and private tightness: “At some point I took to muttering darkly to my mother that charity began at home, but she would always fix me with a contemptuous look and ask, ‘And what exactly is it that you lack?’ She managed to make me feel ungrateful and grabby at once.”

There are meditations on stars, most of them damaged icons ripe for her healing analysis — Marilyn, Michael, Truman, Courtney. Her take on Princess Diana’s marriage will suggest the tone: “I find myself wondering how Diana’s life might have turned out if she and Charles had bonded over their shared lack of childhood, their virtual abandonment as children. …What would have happened if they had the patience (on his side) and endurance (on hers) to address their mutual longings for love and nurturance in each other?”

There are book reviews, many of them learned, some of them esoteric. Zingers appear — on John Updike: “He began to seem like a man who always wore a hat to work.” — but the general reader may feel lost. No problem. This isn’t a book you read cover-to-cover in an evening. It’s a book you dip into, reading what you like, skipping what doesn’t appeal.

Tina Brown told Daphne Merkin, “The art of self-exposure is not simply catharsis.” True, especially for Daphne Merkin. I know her just well enough to believe she found only modest catharsis in writing these pieces. She’s after something bigger, smarter, grander. And in her endless distress, she often finds it.

7 of 8 people found the following review helpful.
A great collection
By 20thCenturyLtd
Merkin has perfect pitch as an observer. A great collection, in the spirit of Mary MCarthy, Dorothy Parker, and Janet Flanner.

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The final book in Howard Norman's Canadian Trilogy: a novel about spirit-photographs, adultery, and greed

It is 1927. Young Peter Duvett has accepted a job as an assistant to the elusive portraitist, Vienna Linn, in the remote town of Churchill, Manitoba. Peter's life is about to change in ways he scarcely could have imagined. Across Canada, Linn has been arranging and photographing gruesome accidents for the private collection, in London, of a Mr. Radin Heur-theirs is a macabre duet of art and violence.

After a strenuous journey, Peter arrives in Churchill on the very night of his employer's wedding only to fall under the spell of Vienna's brilliant and beautiful wife, Kala Murie. Several months later, the uneasy menage a trois moves to Peter's native Halifax. Peter is drawn more and more deeply to Kala as he reluctantly comes to share her obsession with "spirit pictures," photographs in which the faces of the long-dead or forgotten mysteriously appear --and as he sees more and more terrifying scenes come to life in the darkroom.

Howard Norman's The Haunting of L. is a chilling fable of moral blindness and artistic ambition, from a writer of "complexly tragic vision" (Richard Bernstein, The New York Times).

• Sales Rank: #566842 in Books
• Published on: 2002-04-01
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Dimensions: 1.08" h x 5.78" w x 8.30" l,
• Binding: Hardcover
• 336 pages

Amazon.com Review
The Haunting of L., Howard Norman's exploration of depravity and the influence of remorse, overcomes an underdeveloped plot with a consistently eerie sense of suspense. Following the tragic death of his mother, Peter Duvett leaves his Halifax home and travels to Churchill, Manitoba, where he has accepted a job as an assistant to a photographer he has never met. The photographer, Vienna Linn, works for a local Jesuit, for whom he takes pictures of recently baptized townspeople. Duvett soon meets Linn's "exquisite" new bride, Kala Murie, a devoted student of spirit photography, a phenomenon in which the images of the deceased appear in photographs alongside family and friends. Things turn especially bizarre when Murie fills Duvett in on the truth about her husband before seducing him on her wedding night: Linn is working for a deranged English spiritualist, Radin Heur, who pays him to arrange and photograph train wrecks. As his affair with Murie intensifies, Duvett chooses to remain with the pair, a witness to Linn's murderous attempts to appease Heur and the consuming guilt that follows.

Duvett states that a good book, in his opinion, makes him "feel some nervousness, excitement, agitation, even fear about what happened next." By this standard, The Haunting of L. is indeed a worthwhile novel; a classically styled mystery and the sort of strange-but-true tale Duvett favors. Norman (author of The Bird Artist) captures stark snapshots of setting and character, eliciting anticipation by focusing on the essentials and leaving detail in the shadows. The Haunting of L. ends up as an effective ghost story, creating alluring tension in its obscurity, making for an intriguing, if underexposed, portrait. --Ross Doll

From Publishers Weekly
The stark, unforgiving climate and landscape of Manitoba and Halifax, the symbiotic relationship of art and violence and the unlimited vagaries of human behavior are the idiosyncratic obsessions of this haunting novel, the final book in Norman's Canadian trilogy. Like its predecessors (The Bird Artist; The Museum Guard), it offers a potent mix of eccentric characters, mixed moral motives and love story. In 1926, Peter Duvett meets and sleeps with Kala Murie on her wedding day in Churchill, an isolated village on the shores of the Hudson Bay. Kala's husband is Vienna Linn, the photographer Peter has come to assist. He has traveled from Halifax, escaping painful memories of his mother's suicide or, as he is convinced, her murder. Soon Peter becomes the repository of the emotions and secrets of Kala and Vienna's hazardous partnership. Vienna takes money from an English millionaire, Radin Heur, to arrange and then photograph gory disasters. Unfortunately, the most recent job was botched, so the couple is on the run from the millionaire. Vienna, who eventually discovers Kala's adultery, combines revenge and business when he arranges for a plane with Kala aboard to crash. Kala, however, is merely injured, while the other passengers are killed. Vienna coolly draws on his wife's belief in "spirit photographs" to doctor the pictures of the victims so they seem to show the souls of the dead rising from the bodies, and Heur sends a British verification expert to Canada to authenticate the photos. The wary threesome of Kala, Vienna and Peter are to meet him in Halifax, where a sense of menace rises to a crescendo. The progressive intrusion of the alien and repressed into the familiar what Freud calls the "uncanny" provides the rich base of Norman's art, in which he is becoming a practitioner of uncommon subtlety. (Apr.) Forecast: Norman's steadily growing reputation should ensure a solid audience for this beautifully crafted novel.

Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal
Talk about trouble. In this wrap-up to Norman's Canadian trilogy, set in the 1920s, Peter works for a man who photographs accidents he has set up for a deranged client and whose beautiful wife believes in spirit pictures.
Copyright 2001 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Most helpful customer reviews

8 of 8 people found the following review helpful.
Disquieting love story
By Lynn Harnett
In the final volume of his Canadian trilogy ("The Bird Artist," "The Museum Guard"), Norman again uses the isolated wilds of winter Canada as catalyst and character in this atmospheric story of love, art and violence in 1926-27 Manitoba and Halifax.
The novel opens in the middle, with the narrator, young Peter Duvett, waking beside his lover, Kala Murie, to recall the previous night's dinner with her seething, menacing husband, Peter's employer, the photographer Vienna Linn. During dinner Kala had prodded her husband to produce a letter just received from a photography expert, engaged by wealthy British collector Radin Heur to pronounce on the authenticity of a "spirit photograph" Linn has offered for sale. The photograph shows the souls rising from three "Esquimaux" killed in a small-plane crash. A crash that Kala, we learn, only just survived. And believes her husband caused by sabotaging the plane in order to kill her.
In this first chapter, Norman plunges the reader into a tantalizing story of intrigue and adultery, made powerful by the subtle, vicious manipulations of husband and wife and the passive wariness of the narrator. "It all but made my skin crawl, the civility."
Peter, though a photographer's assistant, is no photographer and has no ambition to be one. Instead, Peter makes up captions, obsessively. "So that, for instance, if I left my raincoat inside on a rainy day, I would immediately think, MAN WHO FORGOT RAINCOAT STANDING ON STREET."
Peter is also aware that his situation is precarious, fluid, temporary. "The foretaste of regret. I was convinced that I was building up such an archive of memories - all these various views of Kala sleeping - that I could never get them out of my mind. And where would that leave me, should it happen that we didn't stay together? I'd suffer one of Miss Houghton's hauntings, except without any photographs involved."
Miss Houghton is the author of Kala's favorite book, her professional Bible, "The Unclad Spirit," devoted to the investigation of spirit photography and quoted frequently in the course of Peter's narration. "A spirit photograph is one in which someone whom Miss Houghton called the 'uninvited guest' was present." Uninvited, often unwanted, always dead: an estranged spouse, a debauched uncle, a secret lover. Kala lectures on spirit photography and Miss Houghton and it was in this capacity Peter first encountered her on his arrival at a rustic, nearly deserted hotel in Churchill, Manitoba. Her audience consisted of three Eskimos and her husband - or husband-to-be, as it was their wedding day.
The pair have an extended history, though, and Peter begins to learn about it on his very first night, as Kala celebrates her new marriage by coming to his bed. It is not long before he discovers that Vienna Linn is in hiding from the collector Radin Heur, who pays in advance for grisly accident photographs. Heur had, it seems, paid for a photographic record of a train wreck, but Linn botched the wreck and spent the money.
The spirit photograph of the airplane crash is Linn's inspired ticket out of claustrophobic exile in Manitoba, where winter is one adversary who can never be bested. As his wife recuperates from her injuries with Peter by her side, Linn abandons all pretense of normal civility (the locals no longer worth the effort) and holes up in his dark room, preparing his masterpiece of spirit photography.
The understated tension builds as Linn establishes contact and the trio leave for Halifax to make the deal. Once in the city Linn re-exerts his social powers, charming the police and the landlady, while Peter sinks back into the grief and anger over his mother's tragic death which drove him to leave Halifax in the first place and events build to a discordant, crashing, crescendo.
Some readers may find Peter a too-passive narrator, intentional though it is. It is difficult to identify with a protagonist who makes you feel like shaking him from time to time. Yet Peter works his passivity like a weapon and Norman's unaffected simplicity, carefully crafted to heighten the chilled atmosphere, makes the whole thing work within the framework of the melodramatic plot.

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful.
Spitit photos and adultery
By Frank J. Konopka
I look forward eagerly to every new release from Mr. Norman, for I know that I will be dazzled by his writing. His books about the Canadian Maritimes are excellent, and his writing style is just sparse enough to give the reader a heightened sense of interest in the plot. As usual with Mr. Norman, the plot itself is interesting and entangled at the same time. We have a young man caught up in adultery with the wife of his odd employer, and there are spirit photographs, mysterious and dangerous British millionaires, baptized Eskimos, and a crippling snowstorm, just to name some of what happens in this work. There is enough foreshadowing that you just feel the ominous sense of impending tragedy, though when it comes you realize that you weren't expecting it in just that way. I don't want to give away much of the plot, for it is integral to the enjoyment of the book as a whole. Just take my advice and read the book; you won't regret it!

6 of 7 people found the following review helpful.
Like cold fog creeping under your coat collar
By Candace Siegle, Greedy Reader
If to haunt someone is to steal that person's peace of mind, the three characters of Howard Norman's novel are haunted indeed. Set in remote areas of Canada in the late 1920s, Peter Duvett, Kala Murie, and Vienna Linn form a strange trio hooked to each other by perverse forces revealed in a manner so understated that they become even creepier.
Photographer's assistant Peter Duvett leaves Halifax to take a job in the remote north of Manitoba. The settlement is accessible only by plane and so small that it is hard to imagine that there would be enough customers to support any business, let alone one which would require a photographer's assistant. When Peter checks in at the hotel, there is a woman giving a lecture on spirit photographs-the "uninvited guests" whose shadowy forms have mysteriously appeared in photo backgrounds. Why is this woman giving a lecture on such an arcane subject in a settlement so tiny that there are only three people in the audience? She is Kala Murie, fiancée of Vienna Linn, Peter's new employer. It is their wedding day, an event to which Peter is not invited and from which Kala comes to Peter's bed. With the bride as his lover and his boss as his enemy, Peter starts work. Vienna Linn, he learns, takes photos of Catholic converts for the town priest, but his real business is creating fatal accidents and taking pictures of the resulting mayhem for a wealthy British client. Train wrecks are a favorite, but planes, streetcars, and automobile accidents are acceptable as long as people die.
Yet watching photographic evidence of murder appear in the developing pan does not send Peter running from this strange couple. His passivity and attraction to Kala keep him in their orbit even when he knows too much.
The behavior of all three main characters is so strange that you cannot imagine how the story will end. Apparently, neither did Howard Norman. The climax is disappointing and there is now way this story could be resolved that simply. It negates the atmosphere that has been so carefully built up.

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Herbert Leibowitz's "Something Urgent I Have to Say to You" provides a new perspective on the life and poetry of the doctor poet William Carlos Williams, a key American writer who led one of the more eventful literary lives of the twentieth century. Friends with most of the contemporary innovators of his era-Ezra Pound, James Joyce, Ford Madox Ford, and Louis Zukofsky, among others-Williams made a radical break with the modernist tradition by seeking to invent an entirely fresh and singularly American poetic, whose subject matter derived from the everyday lives of the citizens and poor immigrant communities of northern New Jersey. His poems mirrored both the conflicts of his own life and the convulsions that afflicted American soci­ety-two world wars, a rampaging flu pan-demic, and the Great Depression.

Leibowitz's biography offers a compelling description of the work that inspired a seminal, controversial movement in American verse, as well as a rounded portrait of a complicated man: pugnacious and kindly, ambitious and insecure, self-critical and imaginative. "Something Urgent I Have to Say to You" is both a long-overdue assessment of a major American writer and an entertaining examination of the twentieth-century avant-garde art and poetry scene, with its memorable cast of eccentric pioneers, including Marcel Duchamp, Man Ray, Marianne Moore, and Gertrude Stein.

• Sales Rank: #1401261 in Books
• Published on: 2011-11-08
• Released on: 2011-11-08
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Dimensions: 9.19" h x 1.67" w x 6.44" l, 1.75 pounds
• Binding: Hardcover
• 528 pages

Review

“Mr. Leibowitz has written an acutely detailed, searching, and indeed discovering biography of an operose human being, the beloved New Jersey doctor and poet (and novelist and patriot-critic and autobiographer) William Carlos Williams, whose ever-provisional, always exploratory, and often experimental art was invariably committed to the illusive presentment of simplicity, familiarity, and even normality. Unlike any other studies of this figure, Leibowitz's study of the good doctor Williams leaves us in no doubt of his troubled and troubling character. 'Something Urgent I Have to Say to You' is the first effectively intimate life-and-works study of a still uncertainly placed modern figure to offer a quandary, not a condolence call, a judgment that is neither a reassur­ance nor a bum's rush. Patiently yet sportively, Herbert Leibowitz enables us to make the first grown-up reading of a man who has hitherto been offered as an adolescent hero or a childish hooligan. A valuable achievement!” ―Richard Howard

“Besides being a famously exacting editor, Herbert Leibowitz is a writer of exceptional gifts--elegant prose, critical sensitivity, keen empathy, and narrative grace. In the protean career of William Carlos Williams, he has found his ideal subject. His search­ing account of Williams's life and personality, as seen through the prism of his work, makes for irresistible reading.” ―Morris Dickstein, author of Dancing in the Dark: A Cultural History of the Great Depression

“In ‘Something Urgent I Have to Say to You' Williams--inarguably a twentieth-century American master--is lovingly (but not uncritically) assessed in a twenty-first-century masterpiece of literary biography and analysis. With a fan's enthusiasm and a scholar's rigor, Herbert Leibowitz has given us a bountiful, beautiful project-of-a-lifetime book, the capacious embrace of which is made all the more amazing and all the more enduring by its author's own sentence-by-sentence demonstration of verbal solidity wedded to verbal felicity.” ―Albert Goldbarth

About the Author

Herbert Leibowitz has been the editor of the literary magazine Parnassus since he helped found it in 1973. He lives in New York City.

Most helpful customer reviews

9 of 11 people found the following review helpful.
Fascinating study, elegantly written
By Bibliophile
What an insightful, absorbing, and masterful study of an important and influential American poet. I knew very little about Williams's prose before, and I never fully appreciated how deeply his work and life were entwined. Leibowitz is the perfect guide and unraveler of yarns, who writes in a style that's blessedly readable, jargon-free, elegant and witty. What a welcome treat in such a scholarly work. I was especially moved by the beautiful last chapter of the book, about Williams's old age, when he suffered serial strokes and wrestled with aphasia. Many writers (Beckett, Rexroth, Meredith and West, to name but a few), have suffered a similar fate. Leibowitz brings to that chapter--as he does to the work as a whole--unusual clarity, empathy and sensitivity. I found the book altogether fascinating and profoundly moving, an essential passkey to understanding the heart of Williams' work.

3 of 4 people found the following review helpful.
Revealing Book
By Sylvia Carter
This book contains much revealing information I had not known about William Carlos Williams, the incredible American poet who was also a New Jersey physician. For anyone interested in poets or in Williams in particular, it is a treasure.

15 of 22 people found the following review helpful.
Not This One
By David Curry
Leibowitz' book is an oddly constricted view of an expansive poet. If you're going to read only one literary biography of William Carlos Williams, make it Paul Mariani's 1981 WILLIAM CARLOS WILLIAMS: A NEW WORLD NAKED.

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From the moment their romance begins in eighth grade, Winifred and Bernie are individualists. They pride themselves on being different, and have each other for support through the tough years of high school. So when they consider college, they send off for the same catalogs, promising never to separate.
 
But Bernie's mother dies and Bernie more or less drops out of school, becoming an ordinary guy working away in a tire shop, while Winifred goes about as far from New Jersey as a girl can go: the University of California at Santa Barbara. College is a culture shock to Winifred, but her three savvy roommates teach her how to fit in. By the time Bernie catches up with her again, Winifred has become, well . . . ordinary. Can they rediscover their true selves - and true love?
 
Told from alternating viewpoints, with a sense of humor and a deep appreciation of first love, Valerie Hobbs's novel captures an endearing young couple's search for independence and identity.

• Sales Rank: #4223099 in Books
• Published on: 2007-02-20
• Released on: 2007-02-20
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Dimensions: 8.41" h x .76" w x 5.88" l, .65 pounds
• Binding: Hardcover
• 176 pages

From School Library Journal
Grade 9 Up—Winifred and Bernie, both quirky and unpopular, meet in eighth grade in New Jersey, become best friends, and later begin to date. Poised to graduate at the top of their class and head to college together, the couple's plans are derailed by the death of Bernie's mother. Grief-stricken, Bernie lets his grades slip and decides to forego college. Winifred chooses UC Santa Barbara, where she quickly abandons her unique identity; becomes Wini; switches majors from nanoscience to communications; and passes her days chasing boys, shopping, and drinking lattes. Convinced that she needs him, Bernie drives across the country only to be essentially ditched upon arrival. Nevertheless he stays and carves out a humble existence, sleeping in the library, sitting in on lectures, and almost being seduced by a graduate student. Told in alternating viewpoints, the novel explores the different paths that can be taken, both by college students and the so-called slackers who do not begin their education the traditional way. Though Wini is quick to pass judgment on Bernie's choice of the La-Z-Boy life, he exceeds the expectations placed on him and chooses a more interesting path. The teens' actions and world are contemporary and very real. Readers curious about the adventures awaiting them in college will enjoy this well-written, believable story of the first year in college. By the end, they'll be anxious to learn the outcome of Bernie and Winifred's reunion and they won't be disappointed.—Jennifer Barnes, Homewood Library, IL
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From Booklist
Best friends since middle school, where their geeky outsider status threw them together, Winifred Owens and Bernie Federman expect to go off to college together. But after his mother dies, Bernie's life falls apart, and he stays home to work in his dad's repair shop while Winifred goes across country to school in Santa Barbara. Thrown into a room with three party girls, she decides to fit in, changing her look and her outlook so drastically that Bernie barely recognizes her. This makes for a love story that is anything but ordinary. It captures the headiness of college life, the thrill of intellectual discovery, and the ups and downs of first love (though no actual sex). Told in the third person with alternating focus, the story's suspense mounts: Will the twosome ever get back together? Should they? Bernie, who notices telling details, is a believable writer-to-be. Caught up in the whirl of her roommates' enthusiasm for making her over, Winifred's metamorphosis into social butterfly is completely plausible. Warm and satisfying. Kathleen Isaacs
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Review
"Believable and enjoyable"—VOYA “Teens will sympathize with Winifred as she tries to discover who she really is without losing the one thing she comes to realize is irreplaceable.” —Publishers Weekly “Warm and satisfying.”—Booklist "Drama of the highest order."  —The Bulletin of the Center for Children's Books “The teens’ actions and world are contemporary and very real. Readers curious about the adventures awaiting them in college will enjoy this well-written, believable story of the first year in college.” —School Library Journal
"The theme of finding one's true self is relevant for YAs." —IRA “The whole time, your heart is breaking for them, wishing they would get together. It was written with a unique voice.” —A YALSA YA Galley Teen Reader
 

Most helpful customer reviews

3 of 4 people found the following review helpful.
Courtesy of Teens Read Too
By TeensReadToo
Winifred and Bernie have been best friends, and yes, in love, since middle school. Both were a little different and found fitting in difficult. Their friendship began with Winifred's creation of the Green Hat Club, and then it blossomed.

High school brought an even closer relationship. Winifred and Bernie were excellent students and hoped to place first and second in their graduating class. They studied together, lunched together, and basically spent every waking moment together. Romance became part of the friendship when they shared a first kiss, then a second, a third, etc. Although the physical side of their relationship advanced, both agreed that they would wait until marriage for the final act.

During senior year the hunt for colleges began. They agreed to find a place that would suit them both. Bernie's father worked in a tire shop which made money an obstacle. Winifred searched for a school that would recognize Bernie's academic achievement with a scholarship. All was going as planned until Bernie's mother returned one day from the doctor's with the news that she had ovarian cancer. She was gone in just a few months.

Life for Bernie and Winifred began to change. Winifred set off for California, and Bernie stayed in New Jersey. Headed in different directions for the first time, could their love and friendship remain strong?

ANYTHING BUT ORDINARY is the story of whether or not relationships can endure when faced with individual growth and change. Valerie Hobbs presents Winifred and Bernie in her simple, straight-forward prose. They are regular people living regular lives, but as the title suggests -"anything but ordinary." Readers hear the story from both perspectives and will come to know and care for both Winifred and Bernie.

Reviewed by: Sally Kruger, aka "Readingjunky"

0 of 0 people found the following review helpful.
Bernie and Winifred
By Amazon Customer
Bernie Federman moves to Pittstown when he is thirteen. New to the school, he is a back-row kid wedged between the gangsters and the makeup girls. He meets Winifred, who is a front row girl with a pop-up arm - no matter what the question. Winifred is smart and about as popular as cafeteria meatloaf.

After starting numerous school clubs and having no one join them, Winifred starts the Green Hat Club. Teased and beaten down, Winifred stops raising her hand but refuses to give up her olive green hat with a bright red pom-pom on top. Bernie sympathizes, finds the ugliest green hat he can and joins her club.

Opposites in almost every way imaginable, they fall in love. Through middle school and high school they make plans for their future together when they'll go away to college and get out of Pittstown.

The year of their graduation Bernie faces a tragedy that throws him off course and Winifred goes to college alone. Taken up by her savvy roommates who remake her, Winifred becomes Wini and for the first time in her life begins to fit in. Realizing he is about to lose her, Bernie travels across country to find her.

Winifred and Bernie's unusual love story is touching, funny, and heartbreaking. Will Bernie reach his potential and will Winifred trade his love for being normal?

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~~ Download I've Got a Home in Glory Land: A Lost Tale of the Underground Railroad, by Karolyn Smardz Frost

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It was the day before Independence Day, 1831. As his bride, Lucie, was about to be “sold down the river” to the slave markets of New Orleans, young Thornton Blackburn planned a daring—and successful—daylight escape from Louisville. But they were discovered by slave catchers in Michigan and slated to return to Kentucky in chains, until the black community rallied to their cause. The Blackburn Riot of 1833 was the first racial uprising in Detroit history.  The couple was spirited across the river to Canada, but their safety proved illusory. In June 1833, Michigan’s governor demanded their extradition. The Blackburn case was the first serious legal dispute between Canada and the United States regarding the Underground Railroad. The impassioned defense of the Blackburns by Canada’s lieutenant governor set precedents for all future fugitive-slave cases.  The Blackburns settled in Toronto and founded the city’s first taxi business. But they never forgot the millions who still suffered in slavery. Working with prominent abolitionists, Thornton and Lucie made their home a haven for runaways. The Blackburns died in the 1890s, and their fascinating tale was lost to history. Lost, that is, until a chance archaeological discovery in a downtown Toronto school yard brought the story of Thornton and Lucie Blackburn again to light.

• Sales Rank: #805358 in Books
• Published on: 2007-02-06
• Released on: 2007-02-06
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Dimensions: 1.20" h x 6.20" w x 9.00" l,
• Binding: Hardcover
• 480 pages

From Publishers Weekly
In 1985, archeologists in downtown Toronto discovered what would become the most highly publicized dig in Canadian history: the remains of a house belonging to former slaves Thornton and Lucie Blackburn, who, as it turns out, were key figures in the Underground Railroad. Fleeing Louisville, Ky., in 1831, shortly before Lucie was to be sold down the river, the Blackburns used forged documents to cross the Ohio River and eventually make their way to Detroit. They built a life in the "nominally Free Territory of Michigan," until Thornton was recognized and arrested, along with Lucie. Before they could be convicted and returned to slavery, though, the first racial uprising in Detroit-a crowd of friends and abolitionists who marched on the jail-gave them the opportunity to escape. Fleeing to Toronto, Thornton's case established the promise of the Underground Railroad: Canada's refusal to turn the former slaves over to Michigan's governor established Canada as a haven for escaped slaves (so long as they weren't wanted for capital crimes). Frost spent years researching this story, as attested to by 100-plus pages of notes. Unfortunately, the voices and personalities of the Blackburns themselves remain sketchy; Frost fills in numerous chinks in their story, using first-hand accounts from others in similar situations, but it still feels like the Thorntons have, once again, evaded capture.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From Booklist
*Starred Review* In downtown Toronto in 1985, archaeologists uncovered remains of a house that had belonged to Thornton and Lucie Blackburn, fugitive slaves who settled in Canada in 1833 and later became successful business owners. Smardz Frost was part of the archaeology team and went on to undertake 20 years of research on the fascinating couple. In this richly detailed book, she recounts the perilous journey of the couple from Louisville, Kentucky, to prevent threat to their marriage by the imminent sale of Lucie. They were pursued to Michigan, where they were captured. Protest by Detroit's black community halted the return of the Blackburns to Kentucky and set off the riots of 1833. The couple was spirited across the river to Canada, but Michigan's governor demanded their extradition, setting in motion a legal and diplomatic battle between the U.S and Canada over the issue of fugitive slaves and firmly establishing Canada as the end point of the Underground Railroad. Smardz Frost's fascination with her subject and love of detailed historical documentation are evident in this engrossing look at a couple who defied slavery with their escape and their assistance to other fugitive slaves. Vanessa Bush
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Review
"Karolyn Smardz Frost's superb research has produced a wonderful account of the underground railroad, elevating Thornton and Lucy Blackburn to their rightful place in the dramatic story of pre-Civil War slave resistance, abolition, and African American life on both sides of the U.S.-Canadian border. This finely detailed account depicts a truly international antislavery movement." -- James Oliver Horton and Lois E. Horton, coauthors of Slavery and the Making of America and Hard Road to Freedom "A deep-digging work of rich historical recovery, I've Got a Home in Glory Land is really two books: a biography of two famous runaways and a sifting of the rock-filled times in which they lived." -- Edward Ball, author of Slaves in the Family and Peninsula of Lies

"To retrace the journey of a runaway slave from the Ohio River Valley all the way to Canada is an immense challenge and a rare accomplishment. In her well-researched and well-written book, Karolyn Smardz Frost has done just that -- and more. Bravo for Frost who has saved a remarkable story from the fate of other important histories that have been lost. Only by piecing together such stories and revealing the bold choices runaway slaves were forced to make, the dangers they faced, and the courage required to forge ahead, can we ever fully grasp how difficult it was for a slave in antebellum America to achieve freedom and just how desperate people can be to get free." -- Ann Hagedorn, author of Beyond the River: The Untold Story of the Heroes of the Underground Railroad

Most helpful customer reviews

0 of 0 people found the following review helpful.
it's in great shape. The story is compelling as well
By Calli Court
Even tough it's a used audiobook, it's in great shape. The story is compelling as well.

15 of 16 people found the following review helpful.
A Must Read!
By AfroAmericanHeritage
One would have to read this book several times to completely absorb its multifarious layers, and I cannot recommend it highly enough.

First and foremost, it is the compelling life story of Thornton and Lucie Blackburn. They escaped from slavery boldly using forged documents to travel by steamboat to Cincinnati (appropriately arriving on July 4) then settled in Detroit and were subsequently incarcerated under the Fugitive Slave Law. The community (white and black) rose up in their defense, sparking what history records as "The Blackburn Riots of 1833." After their hair raising escape to Canada and subsequent incarceration while appealing extradition under provisions of the Fugitive Offenders Act, they finally settled in Toronto, where Blackburn established the first cab company. The couple acquired affluence and influence - though they always lived modestly - and assisted many other refugees escaping slavery and intolerance before, during and after the Civil War.

Equally fascinating is the process by which their life story was reconstructed. Both Thornton and Lucie remained illiterate, and no one recorded their memoirs. This book is the result of over 20 years of painstaking research and - as the author states in the introduction - no small amount of "historical coalescence." It perfectly illustrates the creative approach historians must take when attempting to break through what genealogists call "The Wall of Slavery." The author relies on everything from Bibles to court documents to glean information and put all the pieces together, and her extensive bibliography alone is worth the price of the book.

While detailing the Blackburn's encounters with the legal system of the time, the author explores the evolution of jurisprudence in both countries: to maintain the Peculiar Institution in the states, and to guarantee civil liberties (and in no small part, autonomy from the U.S.) in Canada. Some slave owners doggedly expended inordinate amounts of time and money to retrieve their "property" and to punish anyone who might have aided their escape. Consequently, there are voluminous court documents related to the Blackburns as their owners pursued them here and abroad, and legal precedents were set which still have impact today. For example, people are often surprised to learn the Ohio River is actually part of Kentucky - that boundary was established to ensure this particular "highway to freedom" remained "slave territory" and this decision was relevant in the lawsuit filed against the steamboat captain and his company.

For American readers, the fact that this book is written from a Canadian's perspective adds yet another interesting layer. (Oh, to see ourselves as others see us!) Yet while pointing out the obvious hypocrisy inherent in U.S. "freedom," Frost does not turn a blind eye to racism and hypocrisy among Canadians. She notes that while Toronto harbored fugitive slaves, it also welcomed slaveholders and Confederate soldiers seeking asylum during the Civil War. Doubly mind boggling is the fact that the Blackburns had personal connections with some of them...and a few of them probably rode in his cab.

In the standard American narrative, slaves escape to Canada and vanish from our story. While many - heartened by the promise of Reconstruction - returned to the United States to reunite with family after the war (only to migrate north again as Jim Crow and sharecropping reinstated the antebellum power structure) the Blackburns lived three-quarters of their highly productive lives as African-Canadians. This book and the work which went into creating it are welcome revelations. I hope they inspire further research into the lives of those who crossed over into Canaan Land.

NB The book describes the role played by the Blackburns in the development of the Elgin Settlement and Buxton Mission, a colony for fugitive slaves south of Chatham. The modern village of North Buxton is still home to about 200 descendants. Several years ago I visited the Buxton Historic Site and Museum and highly recommend it...plan to spend several hours! BuxtonMuseum dot com

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful.
A moving, important book.
By Nancy Beiman
Karolyn Smardz Frost's tale of the exodus of the Blackburns from America to Canada via the Underground Railroad is incredibly moving and brutal. Moving, because these people, and their mostly-unknown helpers and friends, risked everything for freedom. They found it in the Glory Land, Canada. But they didn't stop there. Thornton Blackburn actually returned to Hell to free his mother, and he and wife Lucy helped other refugee families settle in Toronto.

It was no bed of roses for them in Canada, but it wasn't slavery. Any nostalgia for 'gone with the wind' depictions of antebellum Southern life is put to rest forever when you read of this brutal system that measured degrees of freedom (free blacks lived alongside slaves; slaves counted as 3/5 of a person for census purposes, giving the South more voting clout than it deserved since the '3/5 men' weren't allowed to vote; slaves could be 'hired out' to companies and taught a trade, but their wages were paid to their masters; women were raped by slavers before being sold down the river as concubines.)

The book has its weaknesses. I could have done without the endless geneologies of inbred Southern planters and instead read quotes from the defense speech given by Blackburn's lawyer after the first Detroit Riot ("The Blackburn Riot") in 1833; surely that must have been printed somewhere? I'd have liked it if there were more direct quotes from the principals. And there is a bit too much of 'they might have' 'they must have' and other vagaries. True, the Blackburns could not read or write and many details of their story were not written down, but other people who traveled North could and did write about their experiences in their own words.

The book will leave a bad taste in your mouth if you are from the USA. The 'peculiar institution' was a perversion in every sense of the word, and this book shows how courageous people escaped it and made their own lives in spite of all obstacles in their path.

And their secrecy was so good, we don't really know the names of the people who helped the Blackburns and the others who made it to the Glory Land, these many long years later.

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