Word: douglass
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...have a life outside the intentions of the artist? In Carey's nimble revision of the Malley episode, we enter through Sarah Wode-Douglass, editor of a London poetry magazine, who is thinking back on a trip she made to Malaysia in 1972 in the company of John Slater, a goatish, prevaricating but celebrated poet. In Kuala Lumpur she stumbles upon Christopher Chubb, a disheveled Australian expatriate who has a bike-repair shop but also reads Rilke. Learning that Wode-Douglass is an editor, he tantalizes her, not with his own work but with a brilliant page...
...Carey quotes original documents from the scandal extensively but updates the action to the early '70s and transports a now lone hoaxer, Christopher Chubb, to Kuala Lumpur. The book's narrator (and Chubb's hoaxee) is Sarah Wode-Douglass, editor of a highbrow literary review based in London. When Chubb shows her a single page of verse written by Bob McCorkle (the novel's Ern Malley), Wode-Douglass becomes obsessed with publishing work bearing his name. The mainspring of Carey's story is a fascinating statement by Max Harris, editor of Angry Penguins, years after the original hoax was exposed...
...canons of the 19th century Gothic novel. Yet Carey does right not to belabor his debt to Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, which haunts every page. Carey unfolds his plot in a Chinese-box construction of narration within narration, focusing mostly on Chubb's telling his story to Wode-Douglass in a hotel bar in K.L. It's a convention straight out of a Regency-era chiller: the aged friar revealing the horrid skeletons in the abbey closet...
John Brown, Frederick Douglass, Rankin--the U.S. produced men like that because slavery, the nation's fatal flaw, was awful enough to breed opponents of equal fury. In Beyond the River (Simon & Schuster; 333 pages), Ann Hagedorn tells Rankin's story as a window onto that era's most audacious utility, the Underground Railroad, the network of safe houses, sympathetic whites and free blacks that helped runaway slaves escape to the North. Rankin, his steadfast wife and reliable sons were among its major links--crucial enough that furious slaveholders put a bounty on the minister's head...
...time for us to change that. This February, as we celebrate Black History Month, we should devote time not just to learning about and honoring blacks of the past, but to supporting blacks who carry on the struggle against slavery today. You are probably familiar with Frederick Douglass, an abolitionist of the 1800s, but how much do you know about some other former slaves who speak out as abolitionists in Massachusetts right now—people such as Francis Bok of the Sudan and Ahmeimidi Khaliva of Mauritania? I’m guessing that both names...