The Underground Railroad (Pulitzer Prize Winner) (National Book Award Winner) (Oprah’s Book Club): A Novel by Colson Whitehead (Epub)

Description

Cora is a slave on a cotton plantation in Georgia. Life is hell for all the slaves, but especially bad for Cora; an outcast even among her fellow Africans, she is coming into womanhood—where even greater pain awaits. When Caesar, a recent arrival from Virginia, tells her about the Underground Railroad, they decide to take a terrifying risk and escape. Matters do not go as planned—Cora kills a young white boy who tries to capture her. Though they manage to find a station and head north, they are being hunted.

In Whitehead’s ingenious conception, the Underground Railroad is no mere metaphor—engineers and conductors operate a secret network of tracks and tunnels beneath the Southern soil. Cora and Caesar’s first stop is South Carolina, in a city that initially seems like a haven. But the city’s placid surface masks an insidious scheme designed for its black denizens. And even worse: Ridgeway, the relentless slave catcher, is close on their heels. Forced to flee again, Cora embarks on a harrowing flight, state by state, seeking true freedom.

Like the protagonist of Gulliver’s Travels, Cora encounters different worlds at each stage of her journey—hers is an odyssey through time as well as space. As Whitehead brilliantly re-creates the unique terrors for black people in the pre–Civil War era, his narrative seamlessly weaves the saga of America from the brutal importation of Africans to the unfulfilled promises of the present day. The Underground Railroad is at once a kinetic adventure tale of one woman’s ferocious will to escape the horrors of bondage and a shattering, powerful meditation on the history we all share.

Look for Colson Whitehead’s best-selling new novel, Harlem Shuffle!

User’s Reviews

Review WINNER OF THE PULITZER PRIZE, THE NATIONAL BOOK AWARD, THE ALA ANDREW CARNEGIE MEDAL AND THE HURSTON/WRIGHT AWARD ** NAMED A BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR BY NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW, WALL STREET JOURNAL, WASHINGTON POST, TIME, PEOPLE, NPR AND MORE ** #1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER“Get it, then get another copy for someone you know because you are definitely going to want to talk about it once you read that heart-stopping last page.” –Oprah Winfrey (Oprah’s Book Club 2016 Selection)“[A] potent, almost hallucinatory novel… It possesses the chilling matter-of-fact power of the slave narratives collected by the Federal Writers’ Project in the 1930s, with echoes of Toni Morrison’s Beloved, Victor Hugo’s Les Misérables, Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man, and brush strokes borrowed from Jorge Luis Borges, Franz Kafka and Jonathan Swift…He has told a story essential to our understanding of the American past and the American present.” –Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times “Think Toni Morrison (Beloved), Alex Haley (Roots); think 12 Years a Slave…An electrifying novel…a great adventure tale, teeming with memorable characters…Tense, graphic, uplifting and informed, this is a story to share and remember.” –People, (Book of the Week) “With this novel, Colson Whitehead proves that he belongs on any short list of America’s greatest authors–his talent and range are beyond impressive and impossible to ignore. The Underground Railroad is an American masterpiece, as much a searing document of a cruel history as a uniquely brilliant work of fiction.”–Michael Schaub, NPR“Far and away the most anticipated literary novel of the year, The Underground Railroad marks a new triumph for Whitehead…[A] book that resonates with deep emotional timbre. The Underground Railroad reanimates the slave narrative, disrupts our settled sense of the past and stretches the ligaments of history right into our own era…The canon of essential novels about America’s peculiar institution just grew by one.” –Ron Charles, Washington Post

Reviews from Amazon users, collected at the time the book is getting published on UniedVRG. It can be related to shiping or paper quality instead of the book content:

⭐ About half-way through this book, I stopped reading as someone interested in the story and began reading as an editor should have. “Cora made a canvass of the village.” (Definition of Canvass: solicit votes or discuss thoroughly.)Incomplete sentences abound. Paragraphs introduced by pronouns.” “The sounds that came from his body made the labor fly.” WHAT? Sounds made labor “fly?” I have several pages of examples of Whitehead’s poor writing. “Cora looked at him. Burr-headed and red-eyed.” Who was burr-headed and red-eyed? (I know, and so do you, but it is not clear, clean writing.) “In those days he patrolled with a black umbrella but eventually surrendered and now his white blouses were stark against his tanned flesh.” (Surrendered his umbrella? Which had obscured his white blouses?) I am astonished that this won the Pulitzer. It’s an insult to writers who strive to craft a well-written piece of work. Two thumbs and all fingers down on this one.

⭐ This story is badly framed between truth and fantasy, and fails at both. The writing is uneven, the story choppy and badly structured, amateurish. Sentences without verbs may work for Hemingway, but not in this frenetic , poorly written abomination. Claiming praise by John Updike, seven years after Updike died, is truly underhanded.

⭐ Meh. Why did this book get a Pulitzer? It’s kind of like a Forrest Gump of slavery books – from Africa to the plantation to the syphilis treatments to the abolitionist sympathizer to the promised land that wound up not so promised. It wasn’t all that well written, the prose was somewhat clunky, the main character seemed distant instead of immediate, and long stretches were just boring. There were a couple nice turns, including the mystery of what happened to Cora’s mother – but even the slavecatcher wasn’t all that well drawn. It was like a sketch of a book. Pass.

⭐ Easy to understand speakers, but never could get past the inaccurate, impossible “real railroad” underground. The true history is plenty rich without this embellishment, in our opinion.

⭐ LOVED THIS. So in full transparency, I was skeptical about it, because as a U.S. history major, I have read so many books about slavery, I just wasn’t sure what Whitehead could possibly do that would be fresh, enthralling, unique to the genre and subject matter. Let me tell you something. I was up late, gripping this book, white knuckling it if you will. There were times when I was terribly afraid for the protagonist and my heart was pounding wildly as she faced any number of situations. I would have to put it down, and think, this isn’t even real! The thing is, though the premise is imaginary, clearly slavery was not. Being a young black woman, this hit close to home. What if this was me? Would I have been strong enough to stay focused and calculating. Would I have been picked as an ideal partner to escape with? The end is strong, though absolutely infuriating in some aspects. I realize this was done intentionally, as ultimately this isn’t Disney so you’re not supposed to close with the happily ever after. I’d strongly suggest this novel if you’re looking for a powerful read.

⭐ The Underground Railroad (see the NY Times review) has been the talk of the town for the past year. The basic premise of this novel is that the underground railroad was just that – a real physical underground railroad. This gives the book a bit of dystopian feel, although this is an antebellum tale, with time appropriate technology. The novel has each of the various southern states plotting different paths with regard to slavery and race, and it even folds in aspects of things to come, like the Tuskegee experiment and a bit of Jim Crow, which just adds to the dystopian feel. There is even a little bit of Anne Frank and Les Miserables. It’s a very cleverly conceived and written endeavor. But in the end, the saga is about slavery in all it’s brutal forms, so be warned that the sharp edges are both numerous and very sharp in this story. This is a book about extreme brutality and survival, not about heroes and redemption, although there is a some of each along the way.

⭐ Yes, it’s historical fiction but once he veered off into actual underground railroads, skyscrapers, etc., I completely lost interest in the story. “Alternative facts” do not add a positive commentary to the tragedy of the Civil War and slavery and, if anything, confuses the uneducated reader who wants to learn more about the subject.

⭐ It is obvious that this book won the Pulitzer because of politics, not the quality of the writing. It was so disjointed. I also object to his altering of history such as portraying the Underground Railroad as an actual railroad. The story of slavery is poignant enough. I know it is a novel but there are some facts with which you should never take liberties!

⭐ I was asked to be part of a book club that was reading this book. I was the only black person in a sea of white faces who evaluated the merits of this book. It was a hard read for someone whose family had been enslaved, knowing that many of my family members probably experienced similar treatment back in the day. Colson Whitehead weaves a story that is painful, yet full of promise of possibilities. The excruciating detail of being stuck in an attic for months and months without possibility of escape in North Carolina was just awful. Then he Mixes in the kindness of some underground railroad station masters who helped runaway slaves. There are a lot of juxtapositions in this book. You start feeling good one moment that the runaways will have a decent life and then your hopes and dreams are dashed to the ground with the every Friday-cum-lynching in a bucolic park. Page 176 explains it all to me: “Fear drove these people, even more than cotton money. The shadow of the black hand that will return what has been given.“ To me, this explains why white America is still so afraid that Black people are going to rise up one day and return the “favor“ that whites have given black folks in this country. It explains why many white women clutch their bags when alone in an elevator with a black man. It explains why there is this unfounded fear of retribution that fuels many white folks to this day, as was evidenced by the election of a heinous, racist president such as Donald Trump, and the desire of almost half of Americans to continue his Hitler like reign in this country.

⭐ Historical fiction is my favorite genre. But this is not historical fiction. Yes, the term Underground Railroad is real, slavery was real and the difficulties of black-white relations Is real. But nothing else about this book is real. It is, rather, a fantasy to illustrate the racial relations of the time and of our current time. Had I known that going into the book, I probably would have enjoyed it more. Some of the language is lyrical and, given what I now understand about the book, it does shine a light on race relations. But I still dislike the fact that Whitehead used a real term, the Underground Railroad, as the title for his book but really was not talking about the historical Underground Railroad. I also found the jumping around in time and place confusing. It detracted from the impact of the story for me. Perhaps, reading the book with all that in mind would make it an acceptable read. But as I read it, it was not for me.

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