This riveting, much lauded historical chronicle concerns a Virginia slave's aborted flight to freedom--and subsequent trial; PW said, ``This moving story becomes all the more scathing and rich for being rooted in truth.'' All ages. (Feb.)

Gr 7 Up-In 1854, Anthony Burns, a 20-year-old black man, was put on trial in Boston under the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850. Abolitionist activity and the efforts of lawyers, black ministers, and humanitarians to prevent the return of the prisoner to Virginia caused demonstrations by mobs of citizens, the calling out of 2000 militia, and several episodes of violence during the proceedings. Retelling the day-by-day events of the trial which polarized the city, Hamilton shows the kind of political issue which brought the nation to fever pitch in the decade before the Civil War. Hamilton's biography is actually a ``docudrama'' which centers on the often silent, mistreated, and humbled figure of the runaway slave. Burns' story is fleshed out with dialogue and flashbacks to his earlier life. Through the fictional device of his mental withdrawal into memories of the past, the typical experience of a child raised in slavery is described. Restricted from full character development by the constraints of working with historical sources and trial records (all fully noted in the afterword), Hamilton creates drama and climactic conflict by describing the political, racial, and social tensions that surrounded the trial. In addition to the usefulness of the book to any study of the Civil War period, the insights which Hamilton gives into the personal side of slavery are moving and unforgettable. Shirley Wilton, Ocean County College, Toms River, N.J.