Word: abolitionist
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...reads the last page of Smiley's latest, The All-True Travels and Adventures of Lidie Newton, all of these questions remain unanswered--except for the last one. The idea of anyone writing a picaresque novel about a bold, "plain-looking," young woman settling in Kansas Territory with her abolitionist husband during the 1850s, sounds like a difficult sell, even for an extremely popular author...
...professor removes his tweed jacket, hangs it on the back of a chair and prepares to teach what is widely acknowledged to be unteachable. Things are going well for him. His big new novel, Cloudsplitter (HarperCollins; 758 pages; $27.50), about the raging, God-haunted 19th century abolitionist John Brown, is about to hit the bookstores, and he has learned this very day that director Atom Egoyan's movie of his novel The Sweet Hereafter has earned two Academy Award nominations. Another film, drawn from his novel Affliction and starring Nick Nolte, is ready for distribution. He smiles. Equal to equal...
...eerie sensation to read Jane Smiley's prankish new novel, set in pre-Civil War Kansas, after campaigning with the fiery abolitionist John Brown through the same time and terrain in Russell Banks' thunderous epic Cloudsplitter. The All-True Travels and Adventures of Lidie Newton (Knopf; 448 pages; $26) follows Lidie, a sturdy young Illinois bride, to the dust-blown outpost of Lawrence, Kans., in the tumultuous year of 1855. Lawrence is a raw, ill-favored roost of newly arrived Free Soil settlers, jostled by drunken proslave irregulars from Missouri and protected, mostly with words, by gassy politicians. John Brown...
...they let publicists write history?" Henry demanded loudly of no one in particular. He shook his head at the chronic inability of the industry to get it right. Once again, fictional characters were being served up as actual historic figures. Theodore Joadson, the movie's heroic black abolitionist, never drew a breath, yet the DreamWorks worksheet challenged students to analyze his relationship with the conspicuously nonfictional John Quincy Adams. Moreover, the study guide was laced with inspirational Adams "quotations," all of them made up by DreamWorks screenwriters. And then there were the follow-up activities in the learning kit, including...
...Africans are crammed, awaiting their fate, an astonishing evocation of the terrors of the slave ships' notorious Middle Passage--Spielberg permits himself time to explore every aspect of his saga in rich detail. And he grants his actors--among them a warily compassionate Morgan Freeman as a black abolitionist; Matthew McConaughey as a puppyish lawyer growing into an attack dog; Anthony Hopkins as John Quincy Adams, bent with age and crotchets, but finally lending his eloquence to the cause--a similar latitude. It's a shame that Amistad's release has been polluted with charges of plagiarism, for what...