Sounder

(Paperback)

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Description

Set in the deep South, this is a tale about the courage and love that bind a black sharecropping family together despite extreme prejudice and inhumanity from the outside world. Sounder cannot save his master - a father who is driven to steal for his hungry wife and children - from the sheriff's posse. Nor can he save him from fate, which pursues both master and dog, mauling each of them in it's cruel, impersonal jaws, while the boy who loves the two of them is forced to bear his sorrow like a man. The story burns with indignation. It climbs to moments of nobility and resignation that return, in memory, like a final benediction.

Reviews

"Adults and mature young readers alike will find in the boy's bittersweet memories a parable for our time." -- Christian Science Monitor

"Sounder is a remarkable story, compassionate, powerfully moving, showing the qualities of dignity and endurance at their highest, in both man and beast. A memorable dog story, it is also the chronicle of a man, a woman, and a boy, equally hard to forget. . . . Sounder will be read for a long time to come." -- Wall Street Journal

"The author writes in details that glow alive." -- New York Book Review

"The writing is simple, timeless, and extraordinarily moving. An oustanding book." -- Commonweal

Author Bio

William H. Armstrong grew up in Lexington, Virginia. He graduated from Hampden-Sydney College and did graduate work at the University of Virginia. He taught ancient history and study techniques at the Kent School for fifty-two years. Author of more than a dozen books for adults and children, he won the John Newbery Medal for Sounder in 1970 and was awarded an honorary Doctor of Letters degree from Hampden-Sydney College in 1986.