Flash For Freedom! [Paperback]

George MacDonald Fraser (Author)

Product Details

• Paperback
• Publisher: Harper Collins (1988)
• ASIN: B000YC2VMO
• Average Customer Review: 4.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (27 customer reviews)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

16 of 16 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Another fine Flashman book., November 24, 2000

By 

Tom Gillis (Kensington, MD USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Flash for Freedom! (Flashman) (Paperback)

In the 3rd installment of the Flashman novels, Harry Flashman (rogue, dandy, coward) takes on the mid-19th century trans-Atlantic (and within-America) slave trade from pretty much every angle. Although I thought it was not among the best of the Flashman books, it's great entertainment, and provides a great "feel" for the period. Who other than Harry Flashman could, in the space of a few months, inadvertantly find himself chatting with a young Disraeli, then a young Lincoln? And then (who knew??) provide inspiration for "Uncle Tom's Cabin"? And meanwhile be a slave buyer, slave stealer, slave emancipator, slave protector and, well, slave, while still being the irrepressible Flashy (oh, yeah, not for kids or for the easily offended). A fine book -- lots of fun.

11 of 11 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Layering dark satire onto the diciest of subjects, December 10, 2005

By 

Daniel Berger (Atlanta, GA USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Flash for Freedom! (Flashman) (Paperback)

Flashman is shown at his vile best in this installment of his saga. Signed unknowingly onto a slave ship by his malicious father-in-law to get him out of the country following a scandal, Flashman plunges up to his whiskers into that century's nastiest business. Sailing under an insane, Latin-quoting captain, who brings his tea-serving, equally insane wife along for the voyage, Flashy's misadventures take him from the Slave Coast of Africa to the whorehouses of New Orleans, from the back roads of Mississippi to the frozen Ohio River. Fraser's research into the slave trade is compelling; this is one of the more detailed fictionalizations of the slave trade in most of its horrors that I've ever read. The author gets credit for layering his dark satire onto this diciest of subjects, not something every author would have dared, and not sparing it in the least. It is, of course, almost the perfect vehicle for Flashman's unPC sensibilities, if the reader will forgive the anachronism. His encounter with Abraham Lincoln is absorbing even while satirical; Fraser presents a Lincoln with a frontier-tuned wit that penetrates further than can the capital's shallower sophisticates .

9 of 9 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Flashman Abroad, August 23, 1998

By A Customer

This review is from: Flash for Freedom! (Flashman) (Paperback)

Harry Flashman, the lovable misogynist, blackguard, cheater, liar, adulterer and above all coward, has returned in another rollicking adven- ture by George MacDonald Fraser.

Shanghai-ed aboard a slave ship by his miserly Scottish father-in-law, Flashy soon finds himself smuggling "black ivory" across the Atlantic. Caught by the Yankee Navy, he masquerades as an abolitionist agent fighting the slave trade from within--and finds himself running slaves once again, this time north on the "Underground Railroad" to freedom. The author manages to create a story that is at once humorous, bawdy, witty, poignant and historically accurate. A must-read.