were both on the New York Times Best Seller List. She has written for the New York Times, the Atlantic, the LA Times, Wall Street Journal, and the Guardian and many others.
Her latest book is Magnificent Rebels. The First Romantics and the Invention of the Self.
At the Guardian Wulf tagged ten "fiction and non–fiction books" with "'heroes' [who] are all unlikely revolutionaries." One title on the list:
The Underground Railroad by Colson WhiteheadRead about another entry on the list.
At the heart of Whitehead’s novel is Cora, a slave who flees a Georgia plantation where she was born. She’s hunted, gang–raped and again and again faces capture andthe horrors of slavery. The revolutionaries here are the black and white activists who in the early 19th century formed a secret network of safe houses and routes that help enslaved workers escape from plantations in the south to the northern states. In Whitehead’s imaginative and fictional retelling this metaphorical “underground railroad” becomes a literal system of underground tracks and stations. Besides Cora’s story, this harrowing and devastating novel evokes how ordinary people risked their lives to make the world a better place.
The Underground Railroad is among Chris Mooney's six intelligent, page-turning, genre-bending classics, Rachel Eve Moulton's top ten literary thrillers, Nathan Englander’s ten desert island books, Greg Mitchell's top ten escapes in literature, and President Obama's summer 2016 reading list.
--Marshal Zeringue
Posts
