Enemies of Slavery Book

Fighting with words and weapons, the thirteen individuals profiled in this book stand as heroes in the battle against slavery in America. Whether harboring runaways or leading ...

School Library Journal

Gr 3-5-These short sketches about 14 men and women who fought against slavery in the early to mid-1800s include very little biographical information, but do give some scant data about the vision or direction taken in the person's career. Of the people discussed, nine will be familiar to children studying the period (John Brown, Frederick Douglass, William Lloyd Garrison, Abraham Lincoln, Lucretia Mott, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Sojourner Truth, Harriet Tubman, Nat Turner); five may not (Elijah Lovejoy, Charles Sumner, Denmark Vesey, David Walker, Theodore Dwight Weld). One of the true strengths of this book is that most of the short essays include remarks by the subjects or quotations from their works. Unfortunately, the only introductory remarks are printed on the verso of the title page, where many children will overlook them. On each chapter spread, a full-page painting of the subject faces the essay. These illustrations don't add much to the understanding of the text and tend to be somewhat stiff in execution. There are biographies in print on many of these subjects; encyclopedias and single-reference volumes, such as Jessie Carney Smith's Notable Black American Men (Gale, 1998), contain information on the rest.-Ellen Loughran, Library Consultant, Brooklyn, NY Copyright 2005 Reed Business Information.