reviews

Freedom Denied... Author:  Solomon Northup Great American heroes like Harriet Tubman and Frederick Douglass are known to anyone who was paying attention in American history class, but until recently I’d never heard of Solomon Northup, another former slave who was one of their contemporaries.  While his routes to slavery and subsequent freedom were markedly different, his life story is equally compelling and heroic.  He tells it himself in Twelve Years a Slave. Born in 1808 to a free black father in Minerva, New York, Solomon received a solid education, learned to play the violin, married, raised three children and worked [...]

18 Foot Friend... Author:  Lynne Cox Meaningful relationships with wild animals are rare enough – particularly when they occur outside of captivity – that they have been a reliable source of entertaining fiction and non-fiction for millennia.  You may have your favorite – maybe it’s Gentle Ben, Flipper or Elsa – but Lynne Cox has added a new name to the list of candidates with, Grayson, a real life tale about a baby gray whale. Cox, an acclaimed open water swimmer who crossed both the Catalina Island Channel and the English Channel at the age of fifteen, has previously written [...]