59 books match the query 'Tragedy' and 2 start with d

cover of Death's Door: True Tales of Tragedy, Mystery, and Bravery from the Great Lakes' Most Dangerous Waters

Death's Door

True Tales of Tragedy, Mystery, and Bravery from the Great Lakes' Most Dangerous Waters

Barbara Joosse

Wisconsin Historical Society Press, 2023

True maritime stories told in graphic-novel style 

This beautifully illustrated book for children ages 8–11 relates dramatic moments from Great Lakes maritime history in a graphic-novel style. The book’s five true stories span four centuries but take place in one location: a dangerous stretch of water near Lake Michigan’s western shore that is known as “Death’s Door.” 

Young readers will devour these tales of tragic accidents, mysterious disappearances, and heroic moments. The stories feature a 17th-century fur trading crew, an 18th-century Potawatomi trading party, a mail carrier and a shipbuilding family from the 19th century, and an early 20th-century basketball team. The narrator is Death’s Door itself, who wonders why people insist on crossing its treacherous waters, concluding it is “because they are human. Ambitious and restless…but loving too.” 

An informative afterword provides insight into the author’s sources and features archival images and additional historical details about each of the stories.

Silver winner of the 2023 Midwest Book Award for Graphic Novels 

 
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cover of Driven toward Madness: The Fugitive Slave Margaret Garner and Tragedy on the Ohio

Driven toward Madness

The Fugitive Slave Margaret Garner and Tragedy on the Ohio

Nikki M. Taylor

Ohio University Press, 2016

Margaret Garner was the runaway slave who, when confronted with capture just outside of Cincinnati, slit the throat of her toddler daughter rather than have her face a life in slavery. Her story has inspired Toni Morrison’s Beloved, a film based on the novel starring Oprah Winfrey, and an opera. Yet, her life has defied solid historical treatment. In Driven toward Madness, Nikki M. Taylor brilliantly captures her circumstances and her transformation from a murdering mother to an icon of tragedy and resistance. Taylor, the first African American woman to write a history of Garner, grounds her approach in black feminist theory. She melds history with trauma studies to account for shortcomings in the written record. In so doing, she rejects distortions and fictionalized images; probes slavery’s legacies of sexual and physical violence and psychic trauma in new ways; and finally fleshes out a figure who had been rendered an apparition.
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