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There are some books everyone must read once in their life. Not just because the book is good, but because they need to read it. For reference, the book I needed to read was Uncle Tom’s Cabin.Before reading this book, I was sympathetic to the Confederate cause and admired their generals, swept up in the tragic poetry that had been built around them. I was aware of why they thought, but I couldn’t believe they were all awful people themselves, they must have had good reasons for fighting to preserve slavery, and besides, it didn’t sound like slavery was all that bad.Then I read Uncle Tom’s Cabin and any notions of a sympathetic, noble Confederacy died. This book’s sentimental nature does not hide that it shows the horrors of slavery at a time when it was sorely needed. Slavery tore families apart and demeaned human beings unlike anything else. Two examples still stick with me; Topsy and Prue.Topsy is a minor but famous character from the book who has since become a stereotype of a disobedient black child, which is unfortunate because it misses why she’s so disobedient. She was treated like and told that she was a wicked child all her life. She doesn’t even know who her mother and father are, she has no education of even the most basic things, Topsy shows how slavery denies a child the knowledge that they have a mother, in the sense that the mother exists. Pop culture suggests she’s a fun-loving child when nothing could be further from the truth.Prue, however, demonstrates this taken to the logical extreme. Prue is, for all intents and purposes, a brood mare. Her masters used her for the purpose of breeding and selling young children until she was past the age of child-bearing, and finally sold her off. She has no knowledge of anything outside of her own life, including Jesus. Prue is a very minor character, but her scene has stuck with me since I read Uncle Tom’s Cabin in a way like nothing else has.This is why I believe everyone needs to read Uncle Tom’s Cabin; it demonstrates powerfully how evil slavery is and how no, there is no defending it and that even the best arguments for it mean nothing.Any other books everyone needs to read? via /r/books https://ift.tt/UoLtvT9

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