Open the Door to Liberty
Starred Review. Grade 5–8—Toussaint, born a slave in the French colony of St. Domingue, led the first successful slave uprising in the Americas in 1793, defeating first the French and then the British and American opportunists who hoped to take advantage of the new country. The Haitian revolution is put in context with those in America and France, and its significance is made clear as Rockwell connects Napoleon's defeat in Haiti with his willingness to sell French Louisiana to the United States. Christie's bold, naive gouache illustrations invoke Haiti's beauty and savage history. The scene of Toussaint preventing a fellow revolutionary from unnecessarily killing a white man and the rendering of the bleak French prison in which the hero died are particularly striking. Altogether, this is a beautiful and captivating portrait of a leader whose story will probably be unfamiliar to most youngsters. Written for an older audience than Walter Dean Myers'sToussaint L'Ouverture: The Fight for Haiti's Freedom(S & S, 1996), it is a welcome addition to biography and history collections.—Rebecca Donnelly, Loma Colorado Public Library, Rio Rancho, NMCopyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.