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Uncle Tom's Cabin (Thrift Edition) |  | Author: Harriet Beecher Stowe
Publisher: Dover Publications
Category: Book
List Price: $4.00
Buy New: $1.70
as of 11/21/2009 16:25 MST details
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Seller: kyndele
Rating:  15 reviews
Sales Rank: 9821
Media: Paperback
Pages: 384
Number Of Items: 1
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.6
Dimensions (in): 8.2 x 5.1 x 1
ISBN: 0486440281
Dewey Decimal Number: 813.3
EAN: 9780486440286
ASIN: 0486440281
Publication Date: August 1, 2005
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
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Product Description
The moving abolitionist novel that fueled the fire of the human rights debate in 1852 and melodramatically condemned the institution of slavery through such powerfully realized characters as Tom, Eliza, Topsy, Eva, and Simon Legree. First published more than 150 years ago, this monumental work is today being reexamined by critics, scholars, and students.
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Showing reviews 1-5 of 15
Life among the Lowly? November 10, 2009
Cynthia (Los Angeles, CA)
The complete title alone will make you want to throw the book across the room. "Life among the Lowly"? This book was written close to 150 years ago which accounts for it's anachronisms....in part. It's overly sentimental in a gushing way. Stowe exudes prejudice against slaves throughout the book in the midst of fawning over them. Children parade as little adults, that is when they're not being angels. Slaves live to be good slaves. The really odd thing is there was something about her writing that kept me turning pages. There are so many old chestnuts to choke on, the drinking, clowning, obedient slave. There are slave owners who value their slaves so much they're part of the family, they just happen to be owned family members. The opening scene talks frankly, casually as a KY owner discusses selling Tom to a slave dealer, a dealer who was known to sell slaves down south where they would likely be treated worse than in KY. The owner agreed to sell a house slaves child and how best to get the child from her with the least amount of fuss. Of course I always knew our country had slavery but the very day to dayness of this conversation slapped me in the face. And it gets worse the further you read. Stowe made people re-think the slavery issue. For that reason alone there's value in this book, a purpose to read it. Life among the lowly indeed but who gets to decide who's lowly?
 A powerful, important message in a weak novel! October 24, 2009
Paul Weiss (Dundas, Ontario Canada)
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
As a classic, Harriet Beecher Stowe's "Uncle Tom's Cabin" deserves its status as a powerful indictment against the history of black slavery in America. With courage and insight unprecedented in her time, Stowe uses moving family tales of a number of black and white families to pillory the violence and hatred to which blacks were subjected prior to the American Civil War and thrills the reader with convincing philosophical debates that reveal the astonishing hypocrisy and weak-willed rationalizations that the white population used to justify their actions.
But, as a novel, "Uncle Tom's Cabin" is unsatisfying, overly long and poorly edited. Stowe's insistence on writing her dialogue in a faux black English dialect is unconvincing at best and is actually often irritating and distracting as it becomes more and more difficult to decipher what her characters are actually trying to say.
Her insistence on preaching and using Christian church teachings and the bible as the primary basis for criticizing prejudice, racism and slavery frankly grated my sensibilities. There is plenty enough wrong with slavery and its history in America from a purely humanist point of view without resorting to what would be categorized as "bible thumping" today. (That said, I will admit that it may have been an appropriate approach to convince what she saw as her potential audience at the time).
The white characters she uses to support and convey her message of understanding, compassion and her political agenda of abolition are so sugary sweet as to be positively cloying. A scene in which her primary white character, Evangeline St Clare, gathers her family and her family's slaves around her death bed in order to distribute locks of her hair to one and all was so melodramatic and pointless as to approach the level of bizarre.
I would never say to any potential future reader that I enjoyed "Uncle Tom's Cabin". I didn't! In fact, at times, it was even a struggle to finish it. But the message, the history, the overwhelming importance and the power of the arguments conveyed by the story are more than enough reason to read it anyway. If enough people take the message to heart then perhaps the world has a possibility of avoiding repetition of events like the Holocaust, the Rwandan genocide, the rape of Nanking or the slaughter of the Muslims in Bosnia by the Serbs.
Paul Weiss
classic - sentimental - historically biased - August 31, 2009
Richard Clark (paris, france)
0 out of 1 found this review helpful
classic - sentimental - historically biased -
but useful to 21st century grandchildren to
know background of american race relations
I didnt like the book but someone else might August 25, 2009
Nathan L. Warshawsky (NM)
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
I have a hard time reading it because it writen like how southerners talked back then. but thats just me.read it and make up your own mind a book can be disliked by some and loved by others so read it yourself and make up your mind weather you like or dislike it.
 Required reading May 7, 2009
GibsonJ45 (Virginia)
4 out of 4 found this review helpful
I assign this edition to students in my college US history survey classes, and while there's really nothing I can add to the numerous literary reviews of this beloved (yet increasingly unread) classic, I will say that no other book, save All Quiet on the Western Front, elicits such an emotional, intellectual, and visceral response among my students as this book does.
Everyone should read this masterpiece at some point in their lives, and I suspect you'll be indelibly marked by it.
Showing reviews 1-5 of 15
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