Critical Essay by Elinore Standard
At the start of Virginia Hamilton's Zeely, Miss Elizabeth and Master John Perry are traveling by train to Uncle Ross' farm for the summer. New holiday ...
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Critical Essay by Elaine Landau
[Until] recently it was rare to find an American under 18 who knew who Paul Robeson is. However, within less than a year, several of his old films have been revived, bl...
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Critical Essay by Louis D. Mitchell
Virginia Hamilton is a craftsman, often good at being just that and nothing more. Biographical artist she is not, in [Paul Robeson: The Life and Times of a Free Bla...
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Critical Essay by Jane Langton
Virginia Hamilton likes dangerous edges. She tries things that might not work. Her books are experimental, different, strange. She runs bravely along the edges of cliffs...
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Critical Essay by Kristin Hunter
Virginia Hamilton's ["Arilla Sun Down"] delicately explores one of the most ignored facts of American society: that a great many "vanishing...
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Critical Essay by Rosemary Stones
"Never before has black creative intelligence coincided so opportunely with the development of black pride, the advancement of political-cultural awareness, in...
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Critical Essay by Karen Ritter
[In Justice and Her Brothers, with] school out for the summer and their parents gone for most of the day, 11-year-old Justice is left in the company of her twin brothers...
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Critical Essay by Virginia Haviland
The author of Zeely has surpassed her earlier excellent achievement by dramatizing the history of an Underground Railroad Station in Ohio [in The House of Dies Drea...
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Critical Essay by Jean Fritz
Reading Virginia Hamilton is like being shot out of a cannon into the Milky Way. Sometimes just a phrase sends you off, an image or a scene, but invariably at the end of a...
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Critical Essay by John Rowe Townsend
Clearly Virginia Hamilton is concerned as a writer with the black, or non-white, experience. To the best of my recollection, no fictional character in any of her w...
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Critical Essay by Jean Fritz
No one can claim that "Dustland," the second book in Virginia Hamilton's trilogy, can stand alone. Nothing is meant to be resolved, and I confess that...
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Critical Essay by Betty Levin
Virginia Hamilton is a writer of rare depth and range. Her subjects, her stories, her style, continue to press forward and away from what she has written before. "...
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Critical Essay by Holly Eley
The four children who make up ["the unit" in Dustland], Thomas, Levi, Justice and Dorian, and who in their encounter with "the future" sometime...
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Critical Essay by Barbara H. Baskin and Karen H. Harris
[The Planet of Junior Brown, a] powerful, haunting, troubling book, contrasts sanity and madness, endorsement and rejection of life, commitment ...
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Critical Essay by Joyce Milton
"The Gathering" is the third volume of a trilogy about time travel that might conveniently be called science fiction but is more accurately described as a ...
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Critical Essay by Holly Eley
The Gathering, volume three of Virginia Hamilton's alluring but incohesive trilogy, is an innovative book; likely to engender a spate of analysis from Black Studies...
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Critical Essay by Ethel L. Heins
Few writers of fiction for young people are as daring, inventive, and challenging to read—or to review—as Virgina Hamilton. Frankly making demands on her...
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Critical Essay by Dorothy Sterling
The last few years have seen a slow trickle of children's stories with Negro characters. For the most part these "integrated" books have been th...
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Critical Essay by David Guy
Tree—short for Teresa—is a black girl with a world of problems. She has never known a father. Her mother is a nurse and stays away for weeks at a time. School...
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Critical Essay by Katherine Paterson
There are those who say that Virginia Hamilton is a great writer but that her books are hard to get into. [Sweet Whispers, Brother Rush] is not. It fairly reaches ...
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Critical Essay by Julia G. Russell
[The House of Dies Drear is an] unusual, highly intriguing story skillfully incorporating Civil War history. Thirteen-year-old Thomas Small, his father (a Civil War ...
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Critical Essay by Michael Cart
A stunningly good, absolutely compelling, weird and unique book, Virginia Hamilton's [The Planet of Junior Brown] is the story of three outsiders in New York City...
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Critical Essay by Alice Walker
Junior Brown [the protagonist of "The Planet of Junior Brown"] is a fat, black, hopeless boy, a 300-pound musical prodigy whose mother has untied the wires...
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Critical Essay by Marilyn Gardner
"The problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the color line," W.E.B. DuBois wrote prophetically in 1903. Virginia Hamilton's excellent...
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Critical Essay by Zena Sutherland
[Carefully] researched and documented, sympathetic toward the subject yet candid about his failings, [W.E.B. Du Bois: A Biography] is a sober record of the long caree...
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Critical Essay by Sheryl B. Andrews
William Edward Burghardt Du Bois struggled for ninety-five years as educator, writer, intellectual, and poet against prejudice and fear, so that black people throug...
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