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Harriet Tubman and the Faith Dreams of a Free People (Significations)
by Tiya Miles
From the National Book Award–winning author of All That She Carried, an intimate and revelatory reckoning with the myth and the truth behind an American everyone knows and few really understand.
Harriet Tubman is among the most famous Americans ever born and soon to be the face of the twenty-dollar bill. Yet often she's a figure more out of myth than history, almost a comic-book superhero. Despite being barely five feet tall, unable to read, and suffering from a brain injury, she managed to escape from her own enslavement, return again and again to lead others north to freedom without loss of life, speak out powerfully against slavery, and then become the first American woman in history to lead a military raid, freeing some seven hundred people. You could almost say she's America's Robin Hood, a miraculous vision, often rightly celebrated but seldom understood.
Tiya Miles's extraordinary Night Flyer changes all that. With her characteristic tenderness and imaginative genius, Miles explores beyond the stock historical grid to weave Tubman's life into the fabric of her world. She probes the ecological reality of Tubman's surroundings and examines her kinship with other enslaved women who similarly passed through a spiritual wilderness and recorded those travels in profound and moving memoirs. What emerges, uncannily, is a human being whose mysticism becomes more palpable the more we understand it—a story that offers us powerful inspiration for our own time of troubles. Harriet Tubman traversed many boundaries, inner and outer. Now, thanks to Tiya Miles, she becomes an even clearer and sharper signal from the past, one that can help us to echolocate a more just and sustainable path.
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Night Flyer by Tiya Miles. I was entering both title and author so I don't think the problem is that it is too generic. It's not a biggie, Nick. I'll keep messing with it and...
-Anne_Glasgow
"In her trademark deeply researched, thoughtful and exquisite prose, Miles successfully avoids popular depictions of Tubman as a superwoman 'prepackaged' ... With Night Flyer, Tiya Miles seems to transmit the weight of her subject's hand and heart." —Bookpage (starred review)
"Miles goes beyond standard biographies by foregrounding two aspects of Tubman's life that have rarely been analyzed together: her religious faith and her deep understanding of ecology ... Miles' thoughtful engagement with Tubman's contemporaries allows her to place the icon within a proud lineage of Black female mystics and preachers... . A truly unique analysis." —Booklist
"National Book Award winner Miles chronicles and contextualizes Tubman's work to lead enslaved people to freedom in the North, spotlighting her subject's spiritual conviction and naturalistic know-how... . A notable, discerning contribution to the understanding of an American legend." —Kirkus Reviews
"Stellar ... spectacular ... Night Flyer is a triumph of Black women's studies, a powerful representation of what Black studies—an interdisciplinary field ranging far wider than history alone — can offer our understanding of the past. Read it to learn about Tubman. Read it to see what Black women's studies can do." —The Washington Post
"Drawing on and extending accounts of Harriet Tubman's life and memories, Tiya Miles's Night Flyer situates Tubman as a thinker, dreamer, and doer. An intellectual, physical, and spiritual force embedded in multiple worlds—ecological, geographical, familial, dream, and spiritual—acquiring and acting on knowledge drawn from each of them. Beautifully conceived and written, Night Flyer speaks powerfully of the worlds Tubman navigated and refused, and to our own perilous times." —Christina Sharpe, author of Ordinary Notes
"Night Flyer anchors Harriet Tubman to the faith and ferocity that has made her beloved by generations of Americans. Tiya Miles continues to captivate readers with her luminous prose, her riveting attention to detail, and her continuing genius to bring the past to life. With imaginative engagement, she has offered us a window onto the world inhabited by Tubman and her people, and its crucial legacy for us today." —Catherine Clinton, author of Harriet Tubman: The Road to Freedom
This information about Night Flyer was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Tiya Miles is the Michael Garvey Professor of History at Harvard University, the author of five prize-winning works on the history of slavery and early American race relations, and a 2011 MacArthur Fellowship recipient. She was the founder and director of the Michigan-based ECO Girls program, and she is the author of the National Book Award–winning, New York Times best-selling All That She Carried. She lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
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