65．
Which of the following best summarizes the passage?
A．Open education is a really
complex idea.
B．Open education is better than
traditional education.
C．Teachers dislike open
education.
D．The writer thinks that open
education is a good idea in practice.
C
Harriet Beecher Stowe
By Noel B Gerson
218 pages. Praeger $8.95
“So this is the little lady who made this big war,”said Abraham
Lincoln. The president was meeting the author of Uncle Tom’s Cabin for the first time, more than a decade after the
book’s publication in 1852.“It was not simply a patronizing(傲慢的)remark”. Harriet Beecher Stowe really was small：“I
am a little bit of a woman,”she described herself,“about
as thin and dry as a pinch of snuff.”
If Uncle Tom’s Cabin did not
quite start a war, it ignited the minds of people North and South, both for and
against abolition. Tens of thousands of Americans who had not read the book
already knew Simon Legree as the classic slave driver and Uncle Tome the black
victim.
Harriet Beecher Stowe was a well-known writer well before Uncle Tom’s Cabin made her rich and
famous. For a time, she and her preacher husband Calvin Stowe were too poor to
afford a servant. Mrs. Stowe ran her house, cared for her twin daughters(the
first two of seven children),churned out genteel, folksy stories and religious
essays to help make ends meet.
Uncle Tom’s Cabin changed all that. It was the first great
American best-seller. In the initial year in print, it sold 300,000 copies, and
eventually more than 3 million American readers bought the book. Worldwide,
sales ran to something like 10 million in 40 languages.
In this plain but informative portrait, biographer Gerson notes that
author Stowe never visited the deep South before the Civil War. Most of the
knowledge of slavery was gained from former slaves whom she met while living in
Cincinnati(one of the busiest stops on the Underground Railway), though she did
visit a working plantation in Kentucky briefly in 1833.
In spite of the impact on the world of her celebrated novel it turns
out that except for the issue of slavery, she had a scant interest in politics.