Powerful and engaging.
Drawing on Frederick Douglass’ own words, this graphic novel tells the story of one man’s journey from the bondages of slavery to free, well-respected, and sought-after orator fighting for equality until the end of his life.
Readers see Douglass, the child of an enslaved mother whom he only saw a few short times in his life, with no knowledge of his actual birth date or father’s identity, being left at the plantation’s great house by his grandmother, starved by a tyrannical overseer, and sold by multiple owners. A moment of benevolence by one owner’s wife led to Frederick’s being taught to read, which proved to be the key to his liberation. Placing Douglass in historical context, the book tells readers of his support of black troops during the Civil War, his rallying for women and the vote (despite the racism of some white suffragists), his advocacy of the rights of Native Americans and Chinese immigrants, and his mentoring of anti-lynching activist Ida B. Wells, and it also sheds light on intimate family relationships. The high-quality sources and extensive research lend this book an authenticity which precludes any denial of the cruelty, dehumanization, and intergenerational violence of slavery. The clear, expressive color illustrations simultaneously put faces to the characters as well as softening the blows of some of the more graphic moments in Frederick’s life, making it more palatable for a younger audience.
Powerful and engaging. (cast of characters, timeline, historical notes, sources, index) (Graphic biography. 12-18)Pub Date: Jan. 8, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-399-58144-1
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Ten Speed Press
Review Posted Online: Oct. 14, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
A horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.
“The Mongols swept across the globe as conquerors,” writes the appreciative pop anthropologist-historian Weatherford (The History of Money, 1997, etc.), “but also as civilization’s unrivaled cultural carriers.”
No business-secrets fluffery here, though Weatherford does credit Genghis Khan and company for seeking “not merely to conquer the world but to impose a global order based on free trade, a single international law, and a universal alphabet with which to write all the languages of the world.” Not that the world was necessarily appreciative: the Mongols were renowned for, well, intemperance in war and peace, even if Weatherford does go rather lightly on the atrocities-and-butchery front. Instead, he accentuates the positive changes the Mongols, led by a visionary Genghis Khan, brought to the vast territories they conquered, if ever so briefly: the use of carpets, noodles, tea, playing cards, lemons, carrots, fabrics, and even a few words, including the cheer hurray. (Oh, yes, and flame throwers, too.) Why, then, has history remembered Genghis and his comrades so ungenerously? Whereas Geoffrey Chaucer considered him “so excellent a lord in all things,” Genghis is a byword for all that is savage and terrible; the word “Mongol” figures, thanks to the pseudoscientific racism of the 19th century, as the root of “mongoloid,” a condition attributed to genetic throwbacks to seed sown by Mongol invaders during their decades of ravaging Europe. (Bad science, that, but Dr. Down’s son himself argued that imbeciles “derived from an earlier form of the Mongol stock and should be considered more ‘pre-human, rather than human.’ ”) Weatherford’s lively analysis restores the Mongols’ reputation, and it takes some wonderful learned detours—into, for instance, the history of the so-called Secret History of the Mongols, which the Nazis raced to translate in the hope that it would help them conquer Russia, as only the Mongols had succeeded in doing.
A horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.Pub Date: March 2, 2004
ISBN: 0-609-61062-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2003
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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