An incisive and illuminating account of a Caribbean revolutionary.
A Caribbean writer’s biography focuses on a Grenadian folk hero.
As an award-winning journalist and publisher of the Caribbean American magazine Everybody’s, Hall has written extensively about Caribbean life and history. Born and raised on Julien Fédon’s Belvidere Estate in Grenada, the author has a particular affinity for the 18th-century revolutionary. In this, his second book about the insurrectionist, Hall challenges the predominant narrative in published histories of Fédon's Rebellion that are mainly based on the written records of the Caribbean leader’s British enemies. They portray Fédon as misguided, violent, and cruel. Rather, this book suggests he was, and remains to this day, a hero “in the minds and hearts” of Caribbean citizens for his brave fight against the “mighty British Empire” and for his strategic acumen that pieced together a “ragtag army” of free and enslaved Africans, mixed-race elites, and liberal French Whites. Given how little is known about Fédon’s early life beyond his birth to a free Black woman and a French immigrant, Hall pieces together a remarkably cohesive narrative that avoids the temptation to overly speculate and that effectively places the revolutionary’s life and legacy in a wider Caribbean historical context. While most of the volume is a traditional biography that understandably concentrates heavily on the hero’s military exploits, its final two sections explore the French and Caribbean “influences” and “inspirations” on “the enigmatic” Fédon as well as addressing his enduring legacy, parsing “Fact and Fiction.” Though noting that he is “not a professional historian,” Hall has a solid grasp of the relevant scholarly literature and an expert command of the limited primary source material relating to Grenada in the late 1700s. Accompanied by an ample assortment of original illustrations by Robinson, maps, and reproductions of important sources, this well-written book succeeds in its goal of offering a “reader friendly” work. And though occasionally unfulfilling given the dearth of sources that were written by Fédon himself or that reveal key information about his pre-revolutionary life, this work is a definitive biography of a Caribbean legend too often distorted in official histories.
An incisive and illuminating account of a Caribbean revolutionary.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: 978-0-9970190-4-9
Page Count: 385
Publisher: H.H. Digital
Review Posted Online: Sept. 15, 2021
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
If the authors are serious, this is a silly, distasteful book. If they are not, it’s a brilliant satire.
The authors have created a sort of anti-Book of Virtues in this encyclopedic compendium of the ways and means of power.
Everyone wants power and everyone is in a constant duplicitous game to gain more power at the expense of others, according to Greene, a screenwriter and former editor at Esquire (Elffers, a book packager, designed the volume, with its attractive marginalia). We live today as courtiers once did in royal courts: we must appear civil while attempting to crush all those around us. This power game can be played well or poorly, and in these 48 laws culled from the history and wisdom of the world’s greatest power players are the rules that must be followed to win. These laws boil down to being as ruthless, selfish, manipulative, and deceitful as possible. Each law, however, gets its own chapter: “Conceal Your Intentions,” “Always Say Less Than Necessary,” “Pose as a Friend, Work as a Spy,” and so on. Each chapter is conveniently broken down into sections on what happened to those who transgressed or observed the particular law, the key elements in this law, and ways to defensively reverse this law when it’s used against you. Quotations in the margins amplify the lesson being taught. While compelling in the way an auto accident might be, the book is simply nonsense. Rules often contradict each other. We are told, for instance, to “be conspicuous at all cost,” then told to “behave like others.” More seriously, Greene never really defines “power,” and he merely asserts, rather than offers evidence for, the Hobbesian world of all against all in which he insists we live. The world may be like this at times, but often it isn’t. To ask why this is so would be a far more useful project.
If the authors are serious, this is a silly, distasteful book. If they are not, it’s a brilliant satire.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1998
ISBN: 0-670-88146-5
Page Count: 430
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 1998
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK TO SCREEN
Deliberately provocative, with much for left-inclined activists to ponder.
A wide-ranging critique of leftist politics as not being left enough.
Continuing his examination of progressive reform movements begun with The Cult of Smart, Marxist analyst deBoer takes on a left wing that, like all political movements, is subject to “the inertia of established systems.” The great moment for the left, he suggests, ought to have been the summer of 2020, when the murder of George Floyd and the accumulated crimes of Donald Trump should have led to more than a minor upheaval. In Minneapolis, he writes, first came the call from the city council to abolish the police, then make reforms, then cut the budget; the grace note was “an increase in funding to the very department it had recently set about to dissolve.” What happened? The author answers with the observation that it is largely those who can afford it who populate the ranks of the progressive movement, and they find other things to do after a while, even as those who stand to benefit most from progressive reform “lack the cultural capital and economic stability to have a presence in our national media and politics.” The resulting “elite capture” explains why the Democratic Party is so ineffectual in truly representing minority and working-class constituents. Dispirited, deBoer writes, “no great American revolution is coming in the early twenty-first century.” Accommodation to gradualism was once counted heresy among doctrinaire Marxists, but deBoer holds that it’s likely the only truly available path toward even small-scale gains. Meanwhile, he scourges nonprofits for diluting the tax base. It would be better, he argues, to tax those who can afford it rather than allowing deductible donations and “reducing the availability of public funds for public uses.” Usefully, the author also argues that identity politics centering on difference will never build a left movement, which instead must find common cause against conservatism and fascism.
Deliberately provocative, with much for left-inclined activists to ponder.Pub Date: Sept. 5, 2023
ISBN: 9781668016015
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: June 28, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2023
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