Trade Paperback Harpercollins Uk

ISBN: 9780007210466

Format:Trade Paperback
Published:October 13, 2005
Dimensions:400 Pages, 6 x 9.2 in
$24.95

Not Up to Cornwell’s Usual Standard

The prose in The Pale Horseman is hurried, rambling, with historical inaccuracies and cardboard characters, all of it in need of an editor. Agreed there is little historical record of England’s Alfred the Great; however, it is known he overcame a Danish invasion against staggering odds, unifying the squabbling tribes of Saxons, Mercian and some Britons. Yet Cornwell chooses to portray Alfred as an indecisive, toady of the Church, who only gained his kingdom and victory because of some swaggering, selfish, testosterone-ridden fictional Saxon hero. Doesn’t wash.

Add to that a propensity for run-on sentences, two glaring technical faux-pas (that linen bowstrings are unusable when wet, and arm-rings worn over chain mail), and you have a recipe for a frustrating and disappointing read.

Refugees From Slavery: Autobiographies Of Fugitive Slaves In Canada
Format:Trade Paperback
Published:May 20, 2004
Dimensions:304 Pages, 5.38 x 8.5 x 0.63 in
Publisher:Dover Publications
ISBN: 9780486434483

Heartbreaking Read, Important Historical Document

To say I loved this book is a bit of an incongruity. How can someone love actual accounts from American, mid-19th refugee slaves, full-blown in matter-of-fact prose? There are horrors here that will drop the most hardened cynic to their knees.I originally picked up the book as primary research for a future novel, and found myself once again climbing aboard my human rights soap box as I did as a girl in the late ’60s and early ’70s.

All of the accounts in the book, originally compiled in the 19th century, are from former slaves who rode the Underground Railroad to Canada. This should be required reading.