by James Walvin ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 3, 2019
A solid contribution to studies of slavery in the Americas, providing useful rejoinders to other more comprehensive accounts.
A British historian charts the rise and collapse of the slave empires of Europe’s New World colonies.
There is irony in the fact that Toussaint L’Ouverture, the leader of the slave revolt that established the free state of Haiti, was himself an owner of slaves. The revolt that he led resulted in a wholesale replacement of characters but not of social structures, as former lieutenants became estate holders and former slaves became forced laborers—and sometimes even slaves again. So observes Walvin (Sugar: The World Corrupted: From Slavery to Obesity, 2018, etc.), a scholar who has done extensive work on the Caribbean slave economy. Here, he widens his view to embrace enslavement throughout North and South America, with all its grim specifics—for instance, he writes that “Africans often spent longer on board a slave ship anchored off the coast of Africa than in crossing the Atlantic,” those ships serving as horrific floating prisons until they were full enough for the captain to make a profitable trip across the ocean. Brazil is an important case study. As the author notes, 2.8 million Africans embarked as slaves from Angola alone, most bound for Brazil, joining millions of other Africans, and there they took roles in every sector of society. As with L’Ouverture, there were bewildering intersections: “most perplexing of all to modern eyes, we know of Brazilian slaves who themselves owned slaves." Walvin also documents Britons who never set foot in slaveholding territories but yet owned slaves at long distance. For all its puzzles, the slave economy lasted for three centuries but then disappeared over the course of a few decades as abolitionist and liberation movements arose in the 19th century. Even so, notes the author in closing, slavery has never disappeared. In fact, he observes, given the lamentably massive number of impoverished people around the world, “present-day slaves cost only a fraction of the price of slaves bought in the US South before 1860.”
A solid contribution to studies of slavery in the Americas, providing useful rejoinders to other more comprehensive accounts.Pub Date: Sept. 3, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-64313-206-8
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Pegasus
Review Posted Online: June 29, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2019
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by Elie Wiesel & translated by Marion Wiesel ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 16, 2006
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
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by Paul Kalanithi ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 19, 2016
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
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A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
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