Happy Cybils Round 2 and Happy 2017, everybody! If you haven’t had a chance to check out our finalists announcement, go have a look. From this point forward, we’ll be featuring reviews of finalist titles (and, to avoid any conflicts, the reviews were all written prior to the announcement of the shortlists). Today’s featured review looks at Young Adult Nonfiction finalist In the Shadow of Liberty: The Hidden History of Slavery, Four Presidents, and Five Black Lives by Kenneth C. Davis. The review was written by Julie Williams, Round 1 judge in the NF-MGYA category and a teacher librarian in Maine. On her blog Reading by the Pond, she wrote:
“This book was quite interesting. It was a look at slavery in the US through the lens of 4 American Presidents who were slave owners and 5 of their enslaved people. The idea was to look at the dichotomy between American ideals of liberty and even some of their personal beliefs and their resistance to freeing their own slaves.”
Click here to read the rest of the review.