This book was published first in 1852. It caused a sensation and sold three hundred thousand copies in its first year. During the Civil war when Abraham Lincoln met the authoress of this book he said “So, you’re the little lady who wrote the book that started this Great War.’ The American Civil War was the bloodiest of all those wars in which USA has been involved and in it more American men were slaughtered than all the other wars put together. Her book is in every way a Christian book. It is now a classic. Many feel as though they read it when they were young but probably did not gain much benefit from it. It requires a reading when you are at least in your teens. The full text is very powerful and challenging. It could be used as a book to read over the table to the children, pausing to comment on it and discuss the points it makes. Although not a ‘perfect’ book and considering its style is rather unusual by modern literary standards, it will stir the heart of the honest reader. It is the record of one slave’s unbreakable spirit in the face of the bestiality and cruelties of slavery. I had no idea that it was such a thoroughly Christian book, although I knew it had been used to help confirm and solidify the anti-slavery sentiments already developing in the northern states of the USA. It must be borne in mind that though it was written one hundred and sixty years ago and advanced thoughts that were not acceptable in the society of that day because they challenged at its roots the system of life that pertained in the southern states. So, here is a work of fiction, though the author said that most of the incidents that she bases the book on events that actually happened, she conversed with many, heard many tales of the way things were in Kentucky and Louisiana and the tragedies that befell the slaves as they were bought and sold to masters who were sometimes beneficent and sometimes entirely the opposite, so, the book has the mark of a terrible reality and records many conversations through which the various views that pertained to slavery were argued in those days. So, a book to become more acquainted with a practice that blighted the western world two centuries ago and the effects of which still pertain in USA at least. It is a book to learn Christian values too.
