O America
Discovery in a New Land
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5.0 • 2 Ratings
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- $31.99
Publisher Description
In 1848 an English physician, Nathaniel Trennant, accepts an offer to serve as doctor on a ship carrying immigrants to America. When arriving in Baltimore, Trennant stumbles onto its slave market and witnesses the horrors of human bondage. One night in a boardinghouse he discovers under his bed a runaway slave. Disturbed and angered by the selling of human lives, he offers to help the young man escape, a criminal action that will put the fugitive slave and physician into flight from both the law and opportunistic slave hunters.
Traveling by foot, horse, stage, canal boat, and steamer, Nathaniel and Nicodemus explore the backcountry and forge a deep friendship as they encounter a host of memorable characters who reveal the nature of the American experiment, one still in its early stages but already under the stress of social injustices and economic inequities.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Heat-Moon (Blue Highways) offers a view of 1848 America via a British doctor's journal in this introspective adventure narrative. After 34-year-old physician Nathaniel Trennant gives a lecture in London on fantastical beasts, an American sea captain in attendance offers him a berth on the Narwhale for a cross-Atlantic voyage. The philosophically minded doctor accepts, writing in his journal that he has a "slender notion of why I am outward bound, but I am quite lacking awareness of what I am bound for. That alone is reason to go forth." Writing helps him manage the tedium and cruelties of nature he witnesses on the ship, such as a girl who is washed overboard. When the ship lands in Baltimore, Trennant is appalled by the slavery he witnesses in the city and befriends an escaped slave named Nicodemus. Slave catcher H.B. Ferrall swears to kill them both and pursues them as they proceed through Pennsylvania to New York by steamboat. Later, the men head west and part ways, though Ferrall continues to hunt them. Heat-Moon eloquently captures the Cambridge-educated Trennant's voice as he marvels at America's fundamental flaws and its extraordinary qualities. This unlikely reimagining of Huckleberry Finn as an English doctor is a surprising delight.
