Walk Through Darkness

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Summary: Walk Through Darkness
Review: A beautifully crafted poem of people and events that touch all Americans and still reach into our daily lives. A most important read for anyone wishing to better understand a formative, troubling, and still confusing aspect of American fabric. Mature and provocative themes that should be on high school senior and college reading lists for students and instructors of sociology, psychology, race relations, American Literature, women's studies, and economics. As many books are read chapter by chapter, phrase by phrase or even idea by idea, for many readers, Walk Through Darkness will be a portrait that unfolds word by word. And for many, Walk Through Darkness will be approached in much the same way as one paws over Shakespeare, Thoreau, and Thorstein Veblem. This is the kind of book which ends up with a lot of dog eared pages. Also the kind of book that may be best read in one sitting.

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Summary: How did I love this book? Let me count the ways....
Review: As he did with his first book, Gabriel's Story, Durham has provided readers with a book that works on many levels. First of all it's a hell of a story. This is an exciting adventure, an intelligent page-turner. Interesting, well-drawn characters, who, like people in "real life," can act in unpredicted ways. These characters rank with those created by Charles Frazier in "Cold Mountain."
If you've ever grappled with imagining the lives of slaves in 19th century America, their struggles and the response of whites to them, reading "Walk Through Darkness" will help.
The story concerns a slave, William, escaping a cruel master and his search for his pregnant lover. Durham intersperses this tale with relentless pursuit of the protaganist by a tracker.
While spinning this fascinating yarn, Durham offers a hard look at a time and place not so distant and the attitudes that pervaded American life.
This is Durham's second book, following the fantastic "Gabriel's Story". He is two for two, having hit both out of the ballpark.

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Summary: Durham Does It Again
Review: David Anthony Durham does it again-he creates a historical novel so deep and believable that the reader is left to ponder whether Durham is really a reincarnation of someone who lived several hundred years ago. After all, how else could he know what happened?

Meticulously researched, Walk Through Darkness leads us through the journeys of several characters profoundly caught in the abyss of slavery-people so emotionally rich that we hunger at times to jump between the pages to intervene in their situations. Durham is a master of dialogue, creating words so beautiful that you go back and read, and reread them, to savor their full impact. The threads of the plot are so carefully woven together that when they converge at a dramatic crescendo, you are left with mouth ajar.

Simply stated, this book is incredible. Once you pick it up, you won't put it down until the last page-and beyond.

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Summary: He's really quite good.
Review: Gabriel's Story was one of my favorite books of last year. Walk Through Darkness looks like it's gonna be a favorite for this year. This book will probably end up getting compared to other books about slavery, but to me it was more like Cold Mountain - but where the main character is a runaway slave instead of a runaway soldier. There's a similar voyage across a troubled landscape. There are meetings with a variety of characters. Like Charles Frazier's character, William in this novel is on a trek to reunite with the woman he loves - and as such it's a love story. The other main character, Morrison, is one of the best I've come across in a long time. He shows that white immigrants to America also had a tough time of it. He carries internal wounds that come to light only slowly but that build up to a helluva ending.

I'm ashamed to say that when I used to think of great American authors I tended to think of white writers. Not anymore. Mr. Durham is fast earning himself a place among our best. Color has nothing (but also everything) to do with it. Based on the strength of these two books I'd read whatever he writes next. If his third novel was about a mouse trying to chew through a paper bag I'd give it a try... Which is my way of saying that he's really quite good.

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Summary: And from the darkness shall come light
Review: Not every book has the ability to affect the reader as deeply as Walk Through Darkness affected me. David Anthony Durham, author of the critically acclaimed Gabriel's Story, has written a haunting novel about William, a fugitive slave. One may surmise that the force behind William's escape is freedom. Freedom is, of course, part of the reason William flees his harsh laborious conditions. But even moreso is his desire to find Dover, his wife, who is pregnant with his child and has moved North to freedom with her mistress. The story alternates between William's point of view and Morrison's, a Scottish slave tracker. Somehow these three people, who are separated by miles and life experience, are connected.

Durham's writing is refined, articulate, and descriptive. He makes you feel the fear, terror, relief, pain, joy, and a plethora of other emotions felt by the protagonists. The characters are in no way shallow, instead powerfully constructed with a certain profundity. The author uses a historical setting and breathes new life into it, providing the reader with a raw, fresh story in lands never traversed. Transcending race, time, and status, this Walk Through Darkness will make anyone see the light...

Rating:
Summary: And from the darkness shall come light
Review: Not every book has the ability to affect the reader as deeply as Walk Through Darkness affected me. David Anthony Durham, author of the critically acclaimed Gabriel's Story, has written a haunting novel about William, a fugitive slave. One may surmise that the force behind William's escape is freedom. Freedom is, of course, part of the reason William flees his harsh laborious conditions. But even moreso is his desire to find Dover, his wife, who is pregnant with his child and has moved North to freedom with her mistress. The story alternates between William's point of view and Morrison's, a Scottish slave tracker. Somehow these three people, who are separated by miles and life experience, are connected.

Durham's writing is refined, articulate, and descriptive. He makes you feel the fear, terror, relief, pain, joy, and a plethora of other emotions felt by the protagonists. The characters are in no way shallow, instead powerfully constructed with a certain profundity. The author uses a historical setting and breathes new life into it, providing the reader with a raw, fresh story in lands never traversed. Transcending race, time, and status, this Walk Through Darkness will make anyone see the light...

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Summary: A soul in pursuit of freedom
Review: The institution of slavery in America is a chapter rife with the shame of profit made on the backs others. But even more pervasive is the system that allows this condition, not only to exist but to thrive. The damage to the human spirit of enslaved individuals remains immeasurable, but the strength of character and heroic survival against incredible odds is written on the pages of history. Walk Through Darkness is one of those stories.

William, a strong young Maryland slave who has never considered running away, finds himself in the very act when Dover, the mother of his as yet unborn child is sent to live in a city in the North. He walks away in the dead of night from the mind-numbing physical burden that has made each day a burden, where brutality hangs in the air like a threatening fog, ready to pounce on the unwary. William soon learns that the immutable violence follows him, as he is doggedly pursued. One man in particular, Morrison, a Scotsman, joins the posse searching for this particular slave. Morrison nurtures distant memories that will ultimately bring him face to face with William as they take measure of one another.

On the endless days of his terrible journey, William draws nearer to Dover and Morrison to William. In that volatile time right before the Civil War the events of this intense chase mirror the chaos and destruction as the maws of History yield it's most shameful secrets, man's inhumanity to man. Durham's images are as precise as the cold lenses of a camera, as exact and unsparing, but always tempered with compassion for the humanity of his characters

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Summary: Truth by another name
Review: The novel maybe fiction but the story is truth, masterfully told. Truth may hurt and truth may offend but Durham has dared to tell the truth. He has fingered the pulse of America and touched the heartbeat of those years of infamy that have left a scar on the nation until this day.

Walk through darkness is a vivid portrayal of man's inhumanity toward his fellowman. It runs the gamut of the pathos of a people. If pain and suffering could be measured in miles, the agony of the black race would reach beyond the sun. Durham has skillfully conveyed the physical and mental anguish of a people; the strength, tenacity and faith that enabled them to endure the brutality and savagery of those years infamy and still carries them in its aftermath. Anyone interested in learning what it was like in America when it was a young land will find it in the painful pages of "Walk Through Darkness."

Rating:
Summary: Truth by another name
Review: The novel maybe fiction but the story is truth, masterfully told. Truth may hurt and truth may offend but Durham has dared to tell the truth. He has fingered the pulse of America and touched the heartbeat of those years of infamy that have left a scar on the nation until this day.

Walk through darkness is a vivid portrayal of man's inhumanity toward his fellowman. It runs the gamut of the pathos of a people. If pain and suffering could be measured in miles, the agony of the black race would reach beyond the sun. Durham has skillfully conveyed the physical and mental anguish of a people; the strength, tenacity and faith that enabled them to endure the brutality and savagery of those years infamy and still carries them in its aftermath. Anyone interested in learning what it was like in America when it was a young land will find it in the painful pages of "Walk Through Darkness."

Rating:
Summary: Maybe with this one Durham will get the acclaim he deserves.
Review: Though Durham's anti-slavery message provides the framework for this affecting and beautifully written narrative, it is his message of hope and his recognition of the abiding kinship among men, even within the shadows of slavery's cruelty, which are his ultimate lessons. Setting his story just prior to the Civil War, in and around cities in the mid-Atlantic states, where the ownership of humans was more a convenience than an economic necessity, Durham conveys his story in strong, clean prose, using carefully selected details, rather than emotional language, to power the narrative. His resilient characters give the story the dignity it deserves.

William, owned by the cruel St. John Humboldt, becomes a slave Everyman when he escapes and tries to reach Pennsylvania, a free state where he hopes to find his beloved Dover, who is expecting his child. His travails are those of all slaves, and Durham uses them to show the myriad ways men exert power over others--as well as the ways good men can show their shared humanity. Betrayal, imprisonment, torture, sexual assault, and many other forms of degradation enter the story as William tries to deny his fate. In a parallel narrative, Andrew Morrison, an immigrant whose early experiences in Scotland and America are similar to William's, describes his dogged search for William until they meet in a concluding showdown.

Nature symbolism, most notably that of snakes and crows, combines with some wonderful images ("his eyes were small things, two tadpoles slipped between his eyelids") to give depth and color to Durham's style. Despite his subject matter, he largely avoids sensationalism because he is more concerned with the characters' realistic reactions to horrific events than with descriptions of the horrors themselves--until the end. There the story finally succumbs to melodrama and excessive coincidence in a conclusion that may be a bit too easy to satisfy some of his new fans.