

The Novel That Changed America - jkuria
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052702304657804576402420520976258.html?mod=googlenews_wsj

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aothman
Uncle Tom's Cabin is an awful book. First off, it's boring and damn near
unreadable (it was one of the only assigned books I never made it through in
college). But in a larger sense, the slaves are "heroic" and "emotionally
nuanced" only in the sense that HBS makes them fulfill a racial type:
sympathetic, penitent, long-suffering Christians. They're treated more as
people than as property, but more as caricatures than as people.

The interesting contradiction of UTC, to me, is that it had this enormous
significance to history despite being terribly written. As a modern reader, I
couldn't get any emotion about the book other than it being terrible. James
Baldwin trashes the book brutally but fairly in his great essay "Everybody's
Protest Novel":
[http://www.uhu.es/antonia.dominguez/semnorteamericana/protes...](http://www.uhu.es/antonia.dominguez/semnorteamericana/protest.pdf)

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josephcooney
Before I even clicked on the link I was 80% sure it would be uncle tom's
cabin. The other candidate in my mind was 'the jungle' aka the uncle tom's
cabin of the labour movement.

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jshot
One of those books so many people reference without having read. It's almost
weird that it's the WSJ that's referencing it.

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noarchy
When I saw the WSJ link, and knowing HN, I was expecting this to be about
Atlas Shrugged, or something similar.

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cageface
This belongs on HN why?

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ggchappell
From the Guidelines:

> On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes
> more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the
> answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity.

Works for me.

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cageface
That's a uselessly broad criterion. If I want to read about literature there
are dozens of other specialized sites with much better informed contributors.
The value of this site depends on a meaningful focus.

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AndrewDucker
It's the criterion of the site-owner and runner.

If you do not like the criteria that he uses to run his site, then possibly
you would be happier using a site with different criteria, or forming your own
site?

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cageface
In the many years I've been reading and posting here this criterion has been
interpreted to imply subjects that have some intrinsic interest to hackers.
It's symptomatic of the decline of HN that this focus is increasingly diluted
but the dearth of worthwhile comments on this thread suggests I'm far from the
only one that doesn't care.

