This account effectively shows how the failure of Americo-Liberians to develop a nation doomed the dreams of the original...
A former World Bank official in Liberia chronicles the country’s turbulent history in this debut book.
Liberia has carried the weight of great expectations ever since the first group of 86 free blacks from the United States—inspired by Paul Cuffe, a biracial Quaker—set foot on its shores in 1820. Cuffe had a “vision of aiding fellow blacks both in Africa and America,” Reese writes, one that would be enthusiastically shared by others seeking a solution to the U.S. racial dilemma. But as the author successfully, if somewhat laboriously, details in his history of Liberia from 1820 to the military coup led by Sgt. Samuel Doe in 1980, those expectations have largely—and ironically—been dashed. “The society that soon emerged” in Liberia “curiously mimicked, in some respects, that of the American old South from which many of the settlers had escaped,” Reese observes. “Liberia in many ways came to smack of antebellum Mississippi or nineteenth-century Rhodesia.” Using a wealth of contemporary and secondary sources, the book skillfully captures the immense challenges that faced those who projected their dreams of redeeming African-Americans and “civilizing” Africans onto a tribal, agricultural society that was singularly ill-equipped for nationhood. Some settlers were “surrounded by hostile warriors, their stores nearly exhausted, and fevers ever threatening,” with a colonist and an English sailor killed in an early skirmish. Much more blood would be shed right through the long presidency (1944-71) of William Tubman, the “Maker of Modern Liberia,” and the assassination of his successor, William Tolbert, in Doe’s coup. The author clearly highlights the key flaw in the Liberian nation-building project—the “chasm” between the worlds of the privileged Americo-Liberian elite and the impoverished indigenous peoples. “The Americo-Liberians simply failed to forge a nation out of and in association with the mix of tribal Africans they ruled,” Reese asserts. But he neglects to acknowledge that the disasters of the Americo-Liberians flowed from the settlers’ racist attitudes. Even Cuffe himself complained that if the free people “of Colour would exert themselves more and more in industry and honesty, it would” greatly help those still enslaved.
This account effectively shows how the failure of Americo-Liberians to develop a nation doomed the dreams of the original settlers.Pub Date: July 4, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-4947-5343-6
Page Count: 738
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Jan. 15, 2019
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
An autobiography as toxic and addictive as any drug its author has ever ingested.
The legendary booze-addled metal rocker turned reality-TV star comes clean in his tell-all autobiography.
Although brought up in the bleak British factory town of Aston, John “Ozzy” Osbourne’s tragicomic rags-to-riches tale is somehow quintessentially American. It’s an epic dream/nightmare that takes him from Winson Green prison in 1966 to a presidential dinner with George W. Bush in 2004. Tracing his adult life from petty thief and slaughterhouse worker to rock star, Osbourne’s first-person slang-and-expletive-driven style comes off like he’s casually relating his story while knocking back pints at the pub. “What you read here,” he writes, “is what dribbled out of the jelly I call my brain when I asked it for my life story.” During the late 1960s his transformation from inept shoplifter to notorious Black Sabbath frontman was unlikely enough. In fact, the band got its first paying gigs by waiting outside concert venues hoping the regularly scheduled act wouldn’t show. After a few years, Osbourne and his bandmates were touring America and becoming millionaires from their riff-heavy doom music. As expected, with success came personal excess and inevitable alienation from the other members of the group. But as a solo performer, Osbourne’s predilection for guns, drink, drugs, near-death experiences, cruelty to animals and relieving himself in public soon became the stuff of legend. His most infamous exploits—biting the head off a bat and accidentally urinating on the Alamo—are addressed, but they seem tame compared to other dark moments of his checkered past: nearly killing his wife Sharon during an alcohol-induced blackout, waking up after a bender in the middle of a busy highway, burning down his backyard, etc. Osbourne is confessional to a fault, jeopardizing his demonic-rocker reputation with glib remarks about his love for Paul McCartney and Robin Williams. The most distinguishing feature of the book is the staggering chapter-by-chapter accumulation of drunken mishaps, bodily dysfunctions and drug-induced mayhem over a 40-plus-year career—a résumé of anti-social atrocities comparable to any of rock ’n’ roll’s most reckless outlaws.
An autobiography as toxic and addictive as any drug its author has ever ingested.Pub Date: Jan. 25, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-446-56989-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2009
IN THE NEWS
Stricter than, say, Bergen Evans or W3 ("disinterested" means impartial — period), Strunk is in the last analysis...
Privately published by Strunk of Cornell in 1918 and revised by his student E. B. White in 1959, that "little book" is back again with more White updatings.
Stricter than, say, Bergen Evans or W3 ("disinterested" means impartial — period), Strunk is in the last analysis (whoops — "A bankrupt expression") a unique guide (which means "without like or equal").Pub Date: May 15, 1972
ISBN: 0205632645
Page Count: 105
Publisher: Macmillan
Review Posted Online: Oct. 28, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1972
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