What a time for this book, to sit at the top of the bestseller list, for Oprah and Obama to put it on their book club/summer reading lists. The is the history of America - a foundation that we'd rather forget, because for all that we are "the land of the free," this blight on our country haunts us still today. And though we all, perhaps, know of it, the importance of being reminded of what slavery was, the horrors it held and the reality of the long reaching repercussions that still live in our collective memory today (despite myriad efforts to pretend otherwise). We read about these events in school, objectively understand them, but there is something about a subjective telling, a story like Cora's, that it should be our obligation to witness. We are doomed to repeat the mistakes of the past, are doing so right now, when we refuse to recognize and learn from them. So this book, this story, this telling - it is so important. And the author does a beautiful job of describing the pain, the guilt, the anger, the tragedy - the obvious and the less so. From daily plantation life to the fear of running, the loss along the way, the paranoia of "free" life, the societal dismissal juxtaposed with a false sense of security, the "choices" (or really lack thereof), the advantages still taken, and most of all, the likelihood that no matter how long you are free or how far you run, you'll never escape these things, not really. He minutely details everything Cora must endure as a symbol, representative of what an entire people endured. And he does so with such wit - a little magical realism thrown in with the actual train running on the underground railroad and an adventure of similar proportions to what Gulliver faced on his travels. A literary work both graceful and raw. And a history that we should not delegate to the past because to do so would be to the detriment of our best future: "The Great War had always been between the white and the black. It always would be."