Steven Weisenburger. Modern Medea: A Family Story of Slavery and Child-Murder from the Old South. New York: Hill and Wang, 1998. 352 pp. $25.00. Since the publication of Toni Morrison's Beloved, the story of Margaret Garner, who killed her child rather than see it returned to slavery, has returned to public consciousness. Curiously, however, the novel's historical background has remained obscure. Steven Weisenburger's Modem Medea remedies this gap with an impressive array of evidence about the Garners' lives; he provides more complete picture of Garner than any previous account. This meticulously researched book tells fascinating story in its own right; it will also help critics to understand Morrison's aesthetic choices by enabling them to see where Morrison actively shaped her source material. Breaking with the tradition of interpreting Margaret Garner as the heroic mother who single-handedly murders her children in order to rescue them from the horrors of slavery, Weisenburger emphasizes that the Garners fled North, as family. Both Margaret and her husband, Robert, suffered the insecurities and indignities that were endemic to slavery. From the time he was nine years old, Robert was sold, repurchased, and hired to farmers and tradesmen throughout northern Kentucky. Margaret apparently had to fight off the advances of white men very early, and chose the same tragic strategy as Harriet Jacobs--she married Robert at age sixteen, and immediately got pregnant. This strategy did not save her from victimization. Each of Margaret's last four children--including the unborn child she was carrying when she escaped--was born six or seven months after the birth of one of Elizabeth Gaines's children. All were lightskinned, suggesting that A. K. Gaines used Margaret as sexual substitute while his wife was pregnant. Why did Margaret Garner murder Mary, her own three-year-old daughter? According to Weisenburger, Garner had a tangled skein of motives: despairing desires to 'save' her children, urges for violent backlash against the master who had probably made her his concubine and who might in turn victimize little Mary, and destructive spite for her children's whiteness. Weisenburger's emphasis on Garner's attack on Massa through the agency of his children differs dramatically from the rhetoric of protection that dominates current writing about Garner. In addition, the story Weisenburger has uncovered about A. K. Gaines's reaction to the murder should lead historians to new insights about relationships between slaves and slaveholders. Apparently, Gaines became almost neurotically obsessed with Mary's corpse, sobbing uncontrollably for hours, not allowing others near the body, and bringing it home to Kentucky tied to his own saddle. While Gaines's attachment to his daughter doesn't absolve his guilt for forcing Mar garet into sexual relationship, it offers complex, compelling image of what Toni Morrison characterizes as the jungle of the slaveholder's consciousness. Jurisdictional disputes over control of the Garners during their Fugitive Slave Law hearings led to several public, armed standoffs between U.S. Marshals and Hamilton County Sheriff Gazoway Brashears. Editors throughout the U.S. reported these clashes along with stirring legal rhetoric from the Garners' lawyer, John Jolliffe (my clients would go singing to the gallows rather than return to the seething, boiling hot hell of American slavery), and political rhetoric from abolitionist Lucy Stone (comparing Margaret to those who fought the battle of liberty on Bunker's Hill). …