A colorful and richly evocative story of the survival of a displaced people.
Massally presents an unconventional narrative nonfiction history of the Gullah diaspora.
“This saga begins not with chains, but on African soil,” the author writes at the outset of this compendious account of the movement of the Gullah people from West Africa to the American South, “celebrating the deep-rooted genius of the ancestors.” The author wants to stress that the Gullah Geechee world was not born in the swamps of South Carolina and Georgia but was instead transported there, with care and tenacity, from Senegal and Sierra Leone and the Upper Guinea Coast. He works to dramatize this transported culture via a recurring cast of characters, including Gambozo, an ageless storyteller and keeper of his people’s records, who at one point speaks in the Gullah dialect to tell his young listeners about Bunce Island, the Sierra Leone depot where enslaved people were processed before their brutal crossing to the New World: “When dey took us to Bunce Island, dat fortress was meant to dismantle us…Dey tried to turn bodies into cargo and names into numbers.” Massally’s account follows those bodies and names across the ocean to lots in South Carolina, and he periodically asks his readers to “Learn, Listen, Lift” by considering the history they’re learning. “Study the ledger for what it omits,” he cautions. “Learn how slavery’s engine ran on two things: the whip in the field and the pen in the office.” Vivid prose such as this runs throughout the text as it details the communal and spiritual practices the Gullah people used in the Lowcountry, with “conjure bundles” and other emblems collected and preserved, usually by the midwives and other women, who kept the culture alive from generation to generation. Everything culminates in Massally’s stories of various Gullah Geechee returning to Sierra Leone.
A colorful and richly evocative story of the survival of a displaced people.Pub Date: Dec. 4, 2025
ISBN: 9798994088838
Page Count: 237
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: Dec. 19, 2025
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A concise personal and scholarly history that avoids academic jargon as it illuminates emotional truths.
The Harvard historian and Texas native demonstrates what the holiday means to her and to the rest of the nation.
Initially celebrated primarily by Black Texans, Juneteenth refers to June 19, 1865, when a Union general arrived in Galveston to proclaim the end of slavery with the defeat of the Confederacy. If only history were that simple. In her latest, Gordon-Reed, winner of the Pulitzer Prize, National Book Award, Anisfield-Wolf Book Award, and numerous other honors, describes how Whites raged and committed violence against celebratory Blacks as racism in Texas and across the country continued to spread through segregation, Jim Crow laws, and separate-but-equal rationalizations. As Gordon-Reed amply shows in this smooth combination of memoir, essay, and history, such racism is by no means a thing of the past, even as Juneteenth has come to be celebrated by all of Texas and throughout the U.S. The Galveston announcement, notes the author, came well after the Emancipation Proclamation but before the ratification of the 13th Amendment. Though Gordon-Reed writes fondly of her native state, especially the strong familial ties and sense of community, she acknowledges her challenges as a woman of color in a state where “the image of Texas has a gender and a race: “Texas is a White man.” The author astutely explores “what that means for everyone who lives in Texas and is not a White man.” With all of its diversity and geographic expanse, Texas also has a singular history—as part of Mexico, as its own republic from 1836 to 1846, and as a place that “has connections to people of African descent that go back centuries.” All of this provides context for the uniqueness of this historical moment, which Gordon-Reed explores with her characteristic rigor and insight.
A concise personal and scholarly history that avoids academic jargon as it illuminates emotional truths.Pub Date: May 4, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-63149-883-1
Page Count: 128
Publisher: Liveright/Norton
Review Posted Online: Feb. 23, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2021
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
A fresh perspective on a familiar subject.
The American Revolution reframed as “a world war in all but name.”
The struggle of 13 North American colonies for independence from Great Britain quickly turned into a global conflict, writes Bell, a professor of history at the University of Maryland. Patriot leaders cultivated the support of England’s major rivals, France, Spain, and the Netherlands, which began by covertly supplying the rebels with weapons and by 1779 were engaging in open warfare. French and Spanish fleets turned the Caribbean into a major battlefront, forcing England to send troops from North America to protect its precious “sugar islands,” while American privateers inflicted huge losses on British merchant ships and boosted the rebel colonies’ economy. A separate Spanish-British war in Florida and South America also weakened England’s attempt to suppress the independence, as did French efforts to incite revolts in India against British rule. The repercussions after Americans won their independence also extended beyond the Eastern seaboard. Spain and Britain both tightened their controls over remaining colonies. Native American tribes lost what little protection England had provided against white settlers’ incursions on their lands, which grew increasingly aggressive after independence. Enslaved African Americans who fought for Britain on the basis of promises of freedom were resettled first in Nova Scotia and then in Sierra Leone; their odyssey is the subject of a particularly fascinating chapter. Bell’s international emphasis occasionally leads him to overreach, as when he claims that the 1780 anti-Catholic Gordon Riots in London were “also an expression of popular opposition to the American war,” but his basic argument is sound (and there was considerable antiwar sentiment in England). Based on solid and deep research, his book is written in clear, accessible prose—with entertaining minutiae such as the fact that the minutemen at Lexington and Concord fired guns made in Spain—that will appeal to general readers with an interest in history.
A fresh perspective on a familiar subject.Pub Date: Nov. 4, 2025
ISBN: 9780593719510
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Riverhead
Review Posted Online: July 31, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
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