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Bound for Canaan: The Underground Railroad and the War for the Soul of America
Fergus M. Bordewich
Amistad/HarperCollins, $27.95
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The creation of the Undergound Railroad is shrouded in the mists of legend. Now Fergus M. Bordewich tells the long and complex history of a growing movement that freed slaves and eventually changed the fundamental nature of the United States.
The "railroad" was, of course, nothing of the sort, but rather a gradually developed, ultimately complex network of secret routes and safe houses that gave slaves in the American South a way to escape to freedom.
Bordewich begins with the remarkable Josiah Henson, a "conductor" on the railroad who had been born into slavery and who "would eventually become one of the best-known African Americans of his time." Throughout Bound for Canaan, the author introduces us to people who, like Henson, took actions, either to free themselves or to free others, that were illegal and in most cases dangerous. The sum of their heroic efforts was a great, finally irresistible wave that crested in 1863 with the Emancipation Proclamation.
The Perfectionist: Life and Death in Haute Cuisine
Rudolph Chelminski
Gotham/Penguin, $27.50
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