A gripping tale and a sterling analysis of England’s first foray into the nastiest of human enterprises. (16 pp. b&w...
The swashbuckling, high-seas adventures of an English mariner who pioneered the enslavement of Africans, along the way enriching himself but earning history’s enduring censure.
Hazlewood (Savage: The Life and Times of Jemmy Button, 2001) crafts an engrossing, swift, and sanguinary narrative around Hawkyns, born circa 1532 into a wealthy Plymouth merchant family. He became a master sailor and a ferocious negotiator (cannon and sword were among his more persuasive tools), a man who sailed boldly into Spanish ports in the New World and forced the terrified denizens to trade (i.e., buy slaves) or suffer consequences that included burning homes, plundering local wealth, and killing temporizers. At the time Hawkyns’s sail first loomed on history’s horizon, Portugal and Spain enjoyed primacy in the slave trade between Africa and the Western Hemisphere, based on their arrangements with African leaders. Then the fearless Englishman arrived, using stealth and brutality to carve for his nation a profitable part of this market in humans. As Hazlewood points out, there was little objection anywhere to slavery on moral grounds. Queen Elizabeth, dancing delicately on history’s high wire, offered private support (she had other disturbing dishes on her plate: Mary, Queen of Scots; the powerful Spanish), and Hawkyns found willing investors. The author describes in great detail his first two very profitable ventures and the disastrous third one, during which he barely escaped with his life when the Spanish attacked him in Mexico. Hazlewood rightly points out, as well, the religious implications of all of this. Hawkyns’s Protestant men destroyed and desecrated Roman Catholic symbols and structures in the New World, and the Inquisitors later dealt harshly with some of the English they captured. The author also makes excellent use of some astonishing details, as when he describes English sailors fishing in a South American river for an alligator—and using one of their dogs as bait.
A gripping tale and a sterling analysis of England’s first foray into the nastiest of human enterprises. (16 pp. b&w photos, not seen)Pub Date: Dec. 1, 2004
ISBN: 0-06-621089-5
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2004
BOOK REVIEW
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
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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