{"id":2209,"date":"2018-07-07T16:44:18","date_gmt":"2018-07-07T22:44:18","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.wilsonld.com\/weblog\/?p=2209"},"modified":"2018-07-13T17:05:05","modified_gmt":"2018-07-13T23:05:05","slug":"the-underground-railroad-a-novel","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/wilsonld.com\/weblog\/?p=2209","title":{"rendered":"The Underground Railroad: A Novel"},"content":{"rendered":"

by Colson Whitehead, 2016, Kindle Version, Published by Anchor, sold by Random House, LLC<\/p>\n

This book is about a young slave girl who escapes from a plantation in Georgia via the “underground railway.”\u00c2\u00a0 The book, although it is clearly fiction, implies that a railroad really existed underground and was dug by hand by escaped slaves and other interested individuals. This book was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for fiction, but I guess I missed the point as I couldn’t get the concept that the underground railroad as it is depicted didn’t really exist.\u00c2\u00a0 The underground railroad was, in actuality, a series of routes and safe houses used to enable the fugitives to make their way north to freedom.<\/p>\n

Because of the fiction associated with the “real” underground railroad, I had a harder time buying the rest of the story.\u00c2\u00a0 I believe an historical novel should teach us something about the times and actual historical events.\u00c2\u00a0 The book definitely tried to do this by describing in detail the conditions of captivity under a cruel master.\u00c2\u00a0 Unfortunately, the larger fiction of the “railroad” casts a shadow of doubt on anything else in the book.<\/p>\n

I have given the book a higher rating than I would\u00c2\u00a0 otherwise due to the higher purpose it is attempting to convey. \"three<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

by Colson Whitehead, 2016, Kindle Version, Published by Anchor, sold by Random House, LLC This book is about a young slave girl who escapes from a plantation in Georgia via the “underground railway.”\u00c2\u00a0 The book, although it is clearly fiction, …<\/span> Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[15],"class_list":["post-2209","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-books","tag-fiction"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/wilsonld.com\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2209","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/wilsonld.com\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/wilsonld.com\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wilsonld.com\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wilsonld.com\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2209"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/wilsonld.com\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2209\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2212,"href":"https:\/\/wilsonld.com\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2209\/revisions\/2212"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/wilsonld.com\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2209"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wilsonld.com\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2209"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wilsonld.com\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2209"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}