A fascinating retelling of modern history that restores Africa to its rightful place.
A Black journalist reframes modern history by restoring Africa to its rightful place at the center of the story.
In his latest sweeping book, French, a journalism professor at Columbia and former New York Times foreign correspondent, argues that Europe’s conquest of the world was driven not by a desire for access to Asia, but rather a yearning for the modernity and economic prosperity of Africa. The author believes that restoring Africa’s true place in world history and current affairs is a step toward combatting the racist “diminishment, trivialization, and erasure” of Africans from world history. To this end, French traces “the deeply twinned and tragic history of Africa and Europe that began with geopolitical collisions in the fifteenth century.” The author maintains a particular focus on the roles of African gold, sugar, and slavery in shaping the modern global economy. Throughout, French dispels countless historical myths, including many that render Africans disempowered victims rather than key actors. For example, the author recounts how, in the 1440s, Portugal stopped raiding African countries for slaves, opting instead to negotiate trade agreements with powerful African leaders who profited from the sale of their own people. French also describes the ways in which—despite being painted as a backward continent—African industries were more sophisticated than European ones. The Portuguese were especially covetous of textiles and metalwork Africans produced using complex techniques unknown in Europe. The author effectively argues that these early beginnings shaped the modern era all the way to African independence movements in the World War II era. This meticulously researched book eloquently debunks conventional understanding of European conquest. While each page is so densely packed with facts that it sometimes feels more like a textbook than creative nonfiction, French’s underlying argument and accompanying cogent analysis make for essential reading for anyone looking to decolonize their understanding of the Western world.
A fascinating retelling of modern history that restores Africa to its rightful place.Pub Date: Oct. 12, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-63149-582-3
Page Count: 464
Publisher: Liveright/Norton
Review Posted Online: Aug. 25, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2021
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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