Book Review Of An Unredeemed Captive By John Demos

An Unredeemed Captive was written by John Demos and is about the Williams family and the trails they were put through. In the preface of the book John’s first sentence was “Most of all, I wanted to write a story.” He had taken an interest in Indian captivity and how they treated their captives. It took him awhile to choose what he wanted to write about and eventually settled for the Williams family. He writes about how the Williams family got abducted and eventually all were released except Eunice, who would come to embrace Catholicism, marry a Mohawk Indian, and eventually come to forget her heritage and even her first language-English. John Putnam was born in 1937 in Cambridge. He is an American Historian that discovered his ancestor, John

This book is defiantly more advanced than most high school students would be able to handle. It goes between being tedious and hard to follow to being interesting with the detail used in the book. “The rather vague and generalized phrasing of the title became, on inside page, something sharper; the subtitle reads, “The Privilege and Duty of the Children of Godly Parents.” Sentences like that felt tedious to read while others created vivid imagery. “The rolling whiteness underneath, alive with sun-gilt sparkles. The dark shapes of the forest. The blue that soars overhead. Snow, trees, and sky; a world in three elements.” The word choice that John Demos chose to describe the march the Williams family went on was very well picked. It creates strong imagery to let you see what they saw. At some parts of it got hard to follow the story and events of An Unredeemed Captive, but at the same time John Demos did a very good job keeping my attention with his word

Not only does he use pieces from primary documents such as Stephen William’s diary and letters written by people such as Eunice-he also organizes the documents used by chapter at the end of his book. He was very professional and documented the book excellently. He quotes and adds sections from letters and diaries, and it really helps shape the book and helps the reader get an understanding of what John Demos is narrating. The detail added to the book by the diary and letter passages really helps the reader get a feel of what is going on-John Demos didn’t put too much or too little into the