Reviews for Tasting Freedom: Octavius Catto and the Battle for Equality in Civil War America

The average rating for Tasting Freedom: Octavius Catto and the Battle for Equality in Civil War America based on 2 reviews is 3 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2019-01-13 00:00:00 Frank Koch This book really is not, despite its claims, a biography of Octavius Catto. Sure, there are multiple pages devoted to him, but I'd say that at most 20 per cent of the book is about Catto. So what is the book about? I'd say it tells the story of African Americans in the Northern United States during the middle decades of the 19th Century. It has a primary, not not exclusive, focus on events in Philadelphia. It's a worthy subject for a book, especially the accounts of the abolition movement, the fight for black suffrage (and the efforts to intimidate black voters once they had received access to the ballot box) and a battle to desegregate the Philadelphia streetcars, a century before Rosa Parks and Montgomery, Alabama. So there's a lot of good stuff in the book. Unfortunately, there's just a lot of stuff in this book. It tends to meander from subject to subject, a parade of facts that don't quite work as a narrative structure. It's almost as if the authors felt they had to include every tidbit that they discovered during their research. (I doubt that this is literally true, but the book would definitely have benefited if it had been streamlined a bit. Maybe it should have been about 300 pages instead of 486.) Octavius Catto has received quite a bit of attention during recent years in the Philadelphia area. His statue was installed in front of City Hall in 2017. I've been aware of this book for several years, and have been looking forward to reading it. I was surprised and disappointed that despite its interesting subject it became a chore to finish. I recently decided that I'm going to try to read at least one book per year about Philadelphia. (I'm a New Yorker by birth and by sentiment, but I've now lived more than half my life in the Philadelphia suburbs and decided it's time to devote at least a small portion of my reading to this nearby city.)

Review # 2 was written on 2011-08-04 00:00:00 Christian Coulais Recent history texts of The American Civil Rights Movement have tended to roll back its timeline before 1954 and expand its cast of heroes. Well, this book is about a civil rights leader whose murder came six years after the assassination of a great American President. Oh, you might think, another book about MLK and JFK. Biddle and Dubin are writing about the death of Octavius Valentine Catto in Philadelphia in 1871, six years after Abraham Lincoln's assassination. Expertly researched, this book exploded all my notions about civil rights timelines. It painstakingly connected the 19th century struggles of African Americans to end slavery, to serve in the military, to ride in streetcars, to agitate for voting rights, with all their subsequent battles during Reconstruction and the rise of Jim Crow. I'll be citing this informative text for many years to come. It was not, however, an easy read. For that reason I gave it only four stars.