"Engrossing.An enlightening and entertaining portrait of a community that deserves to be better remembered and understood, and that embodied, within its limitations, the best kind of American idealism." -- Wall Street Journal "Makes an excellent case for the enduring legacy of persuasion and nonviolence. VERDICT: A fascinating account of the abolitionist movement, with the city of Boston as an excellent setting." -- Library Journal , starred review " The Boston Way brings back the full complexity and dynamism of one of America's great protest movements. In the decades before the Civil War finally clarified things, a group of Boston reformers gathered around the overlapping causes of anti-slavery, peace, women's rights, and Transcendentalism. They were hardly united; being Bostonians, they disagreed with each other nearly as often as they did with the wider society around them. But their noisy advocacy made a difference, and awakened Americans from the moral indifference that permitted slavery to last as long as it did.

With a deep understanding of the clique's web of interrelationships, The Boston Way restores the family feeling behind a great crusade for justice.the belief that overcoming racial slavery would depend, not on bloodshed, but on peaceful change." -- Ted Widmer, author of Lincoln on the Verge: Thirteen Days to Washington "The causes of ending slavery and war alike were inextricable for an almost forgotten generation of America's greatest activists. In his new book, filled with gripping scenes and unforgettable protagonists, Mark Kurlansky dramatizes the struggle before the Civil War to keep the two causes together. The best histories make the legacy of our past less obvious. It is a gift for our present that The Boston Way recovers the belief that overcoming racial slavery would depend, not on bloodshed, but on peaceful change." -- Samuel Moyn, author of Humane: How the United States Abandoned Peace and Reinvented War "Mark Kurlansky's marvelous new book rescues the Boston Clique from the condescension of history. Showing how William Lloyd Garrison and Lydia Maria Child - allied with assorted feminists, transcendentalists, and pacifists - pioneered nonviolent means of resistance to racism that anticipated the twentieth century civil rights movement, this timely, intelligent study, is a pleasure to read.

" -- David Brown, author of The First Populist: The Defiant Life of Andrew Jackson.