Rating: 
Summary: Tobin has crossed the bridge between the races.
Review: Why is Amazon including Benberry as an author of this book? There is a grammatical error at the top of your review..."McDaniel's" doesn't require the apostrophe or the s...simply McDaniel will do.
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Summary: Good Story But Needs More
Review: The authors have a good command of "art speak" and that allows them to present their evidence in a very readable and convicing manner.To complete this book and make a stronger case I hope the authors follow up with another book that uses more oral history or traditional historical documentation of those who escaped from the South and made it to either the North or Canada. THAT WOULD BE A GREAT STORY! My hope is that those with stories of escape and courage will now share the tales with the world!
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Summary: Absolutely an outstanding book.
Review: I have always been a student of history and considered myself fairly well informed. I am also a musician and thought I knew something about spirituals. This book destroyed both beliefs. I will never view a quilt or hear a spiritual again without new found knowledge.
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Summary: Let's get the facts straight
Review: If you're interested in how human beings survive and thrive under adverse circumstances and are specifically interested in the reliance and resourcefulness of the bearers of African culture, you'll enjoy this book. I feel someone should respond to the profoundly inaccurate characterzations of this book by "danael@earthlink.net from California" and to a lesser degree "A reader from Oregon." Contrary to claims by Danael, NOWHERE in the book do the authors "attempt to usurp the origin of quilting patterns and assign them to another group." In fact, early on they state very clearly that the tradition of quilting they describe is "a cultural hybrid, mixing African encoding traditions with American quilt patterning conventions..." Another blatant inaccuracy is the statement that no original African-American quilts appear in the book. This is simply not true. The book contains color reproductions of African, traditional African-American, and contemporary African-American quilts, including a quilt belonging to Frederick Douglass. As for the Oregon reader's statement that "title is a misnomer as to total content" this is also not factual. The book's title "Hidden in Plain View: A Secret Story of Quilts and the Undeground Railroad" is a very precise and complete description of the book's contents. Another statment by the same reviewer is so inaccurate as to be bizarre: "The amount of information contained about quilts and patterns and their meanings could be explained in a 1-2 page article." The origins and possible meanings of over ten patterns are discussed, each pattern requiring several pages worth of exposition. I hope that no one is discouraged from reading this remarkable book by reviews that fail the test of basic accuracy. This book is worthy of attention and study.
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Summary: Fascinating subject - Presented well by the authors
Review: In USA Today, I read the history of Ms. Tobin's involvement in the subject. It is truly a fascinating subject and just scratches the surface as to what other "hidden languages" have been utilized by downtrodden people. The co-authors present their case extremely well and show how the slaves utilized the hidden messages on the quilts to effect their escape from bondage. I recommend the book to anyone interested in the concept of people's refusal to give up without a fight. It's a most uplifting story and truly amazing that 1) it never had been widely discussed before and 2) that it finally did come out. 5 stars!
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Summary: A MUST for every quilt history and black history library.
Review: Powerful. Riveting. Compelling. A Wake-Up Call to All Researchers and Historians Everywhere. --Wilene Smith, quilt historian
Rating: 
Summary: --Sadly disappointing--
Review: I was intrigued when I found this book and really wanted to like it. However, I feel that HIDDEN IN PLAIN VIEW has no substance and offers no new information that can be validated. The authors base their premise, that quilts were used as a tool to help slaves escape, on the word of a woman who sells quilts in South Carolina. The theory was that quilts with different symbols were displayed and they gave messages to the slaves. The authors also went back into African history and attempted to tie in a lot of symbols. I believe the authors were trying, but they really had no solid information to offer and kept on spinning their story. It is possible that along a route going north, a quilt could be displayed outside of a house as a message that this was a "safe house" or something of that nature. Escaping slaves mostly traveled by night, so hanging out a quilt would only work during the daylight hours. There's a story for children called SWEET CLARA AND THE FREEDOM QUILT that is quite good. The girl in the story makes a quilt out of scraps of material that detail the plantation that she lives on; also detailed, was the area outside the plantation, which was more difficult since the girl had to have that area described to her. In the book, the quilt is used as a map for anyone attempting to escape and go to Canada. I really liked the idea and found it plausible. I think, that after all of this time, we'll never know for sure if quilts were hung as signals for the travelers on the Underground Railroad, but the idea of a quilt helping to save a human life is comforting.
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Summary: Book Creates New American Myth
Review: The book, Hidden in Plain View, is based on the oral testimony of an elderly lady, shared with one of the co-authors shortly before she died. This book was immediately seized upon by the popular press and apparently, embraced by many people as the "Gospel Truth".
Page 33 of the book shares the author's own statement that the book is conjecture. No collaborative evidence was provided nor sought by the books' authors, and since neither of them are quilt historians, they surely did not realize the inanity of what is proposed.
In my opinion, this book is a major insult to intelligent people everywhere yet it has been picked up to be shared as "fact" in Social Studies classes across America, instead of the "fiction" that it is. The book does not jibe with what we know about the Underground Railroad and African American history. Most certainly, the depiction of quilt blocks is not in tandem with known quilt and/or quilt block history.
Members of the American Quilt Study Group, a group that is comprised of University professors, professional writers/book authors, appraisers, publishers, and many others associated with the quilt world, have privately and publicly condemned this book. For interesting reading, you may like to read the introductory remarks that Marsha MacDowell shared in the year 2000. Marsha is a researcher and faculty member of Michigan State University, and her thoughts are available to read in Vol. 21 of the Research Papers of the American Quilt Study Group "Uncoverings", 2000.
From a quiltmaker's point of view and also that of a quilt historian, several of my articles about Hidden in Plain View have been published by major magazines. This book, HIdden in Plain View, is scholarship at its worst.
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Summary: Master's Thesis as Literature?
Review: I can't add much to the other reviewers who have comprehensively covered the deficiencies of this book. Aside from the leaps of faith made in the research, it reads like the author's master's thesis, crafted for academia and not for actual reading.
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Summary: Caveat Emptor -- An interesting fiction
Review: I agree with most of the reviews of this book that the material is indeed fascinating. It just doesn't happen to be true. Sadly, the "quilt code" myth has been invented by a couple of vendors who sell quilts, and now also sell books, speaking engagements, memorabilia, etc. This isn't the place for a "debunking", however. If you're interested in seriously evaluating the facts of the issue, and comparing this book's unfounded (indeed unique) claims against real scholarship on the Underground Railroad and the history of quilting, a good place to start is the research of Leigh Fellner, which appears in the March 2003 issue of Traditional Quiltworks magazine as well as the Hart Cottage Quilts website.
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