An authoritative contribution to the dismal history of race in America.
The Pulitzer Prize–winning historian returns with a study of the era that “changed the American understanding of liberty and slavery.”
Larson, author of Franklin & Washington, A Magnificent Catastrophe, and other acclaimed books of American history, recasts the narrative of the nation’s founding by focusing on vociferous debates about liberty that erupted during three crucial decades of revolutionary fervor. By 1700, more than 2 million enslaved Africans had been shipped to America. At a time when rebellious colonists proclaimed their refusal to be enslaved by the British, most saw no contradiction in buying and selling men, women, and children. Many, especially in the South, agreed with Thomas Jefferson that Blacks were inferior, “incapable of liberty on a par with whites.” Some, mostly in the Northern states, held that slavery was morally “odious,” incompatible with a nation promoting freedom for all. War gave enslaved people some hope of liberation: More Blacks served on the British side than the American, hoping to gain freedom from the nation that had abolished slavery. The American military refused to integrate until troops became so decimated that Blacks were accepted into “non-arms-bearing duties.” In 1777, when conscription was initiated, Whites in New England freed slaves to send as substitutes. By the time of the Constitutional Convention, the issue of slavery created a deep sectional divide, with the South refusing to ratify any document that did not preserve the Atlantic slave trade and assure the return of fugitive slaves. Although the term slave does not appear in the Constitution, provisions over the right to property mollified slave owners. Larson’s stirring narrative includes the perspectives of free and escaped slaves, such as James Somerset, who was brought to England by his owner, where he successfully sued for his freedom; poet Phillis Wheatley; and Ona Judge, dower property of Martha Washington, whose escape incited George Washington’s desperate, enraged search for her return.
An authoritative contribution to the dismal history of race in America.Pub Date: Jan. 17, 2023
ISBN: 978-0-393-88220-9
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: Oct. 19, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2022
BOOK REVIEW
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
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.
Atlantic senior writer Coates (The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”Pub Date: July 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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