Amazing Grace:William Wilberforce and the Heroic Campaign to End Slavery

This was another book that I purchased at a sale on Audible.com.  It was $5 and 10 hours long.  It was cheap and I knew a movie had been based loosely on it.  Many people that I trust really liked the movie, but I have never seen it.

It is an era of history that I don’t know much about so the history was interesting.  Wilberforce and Pitt and a few others took over Parliment and ran the government starting in their mid 20s.  It was just as a big deal then for government to be run by a bunch of 20 year old single guys as it would be now.

What I don’t like is that instead of a balance biography, this book borders on hagiography, in the original sense of the word.  The author really wants to make Wilberforce into an evangelical saint.  And I think Wilberforce should be held in high regard and deserves all of the praise that comes his way.  He was revolutionary.  He did change England and the rest of the world.  But he wasn’t perfect and I think that we need to hold up not the idealized man, but the real, whole man.

I think the book is probably ok as an introduction, but if you are looking for a good book on Wilberforce, instead of a cheap listen, then I would keep looking.

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