Review: The Underground Railroad

The Underground Railroad by Colson Whitehead
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Colson Whitehead delivers page after page of devastation in this raw and piercingly graphic story.

Cora is a young, terrified slave desperate to escape the bloody, brutal machine of slavery in the South. She discovers the underground railroad where brave people risk all to help slaves escape to safe states. However, here she discovers a different kind of control, a different set of assumptions -less violent but still reeking of the privations of parity.

If your knowledge of slavery in America comes from history books, as does mine, you will have the breath knocked out of you with this depiction of the gears of human bondage.

Whitehead has a distinct voice and a forceful writing style. There is nothing elliptical about his sentences. He whips with his words and you will feel wounded by them. I think this is his aim. Although Mr. Colson himself seems to have had all of the advantages of wealth and a superb education, he taps into the depravity of the ownership of humans by other humans as though he had been right there. That's the power of this book. It makesyou feel. The pain migrates away from the journalistic toward the experienced, where it is felt and not dismissed, not shelved.

The economics of slavery -- the cotton business -- is a leitmotif throughout. It underscored (for me) the grave danger of a culture that worships big industry. Industry and the making of money has the (ruinous) potential to diminish humanity .

I found The Underground Railroad very hard to read and more than once turned my head and my heart away from the wickedness inflicted on the enslaved. I found I had to catch my breath. This is a powerful book.

View all my reviews