Byrne brings to this brief history an eye for telling details of daily life, slaveholders’ unthinkable cruelty, and the...
A history of Britain’s anti-slavery struggle that begins with a child.
Dido Elizabeth Belle, the daughter of a slave, known as Maria, and her aristocratic British lover, Sir John Lindsay, was raised as the adopted daughter of Lindsay’s uncle, the Earl of Mansfield, and his wife, Lady Mansfield. With little information available on Dido herself, Byrne (The Real Jane Austen: A Life in Small Things, 2013, etc.) places her at the center of an engrossing, and horrifying, history of the strident, combative and ultimately successful abolition movement in England. Where Dido was born and what relationship Lindsay had with her mother are unanswered questions. “The only thing we can know for sure,” writes the author, “is that Captain Lindsay took a bold and unconventional step in arranging for his small daughter to be…entrusted to a family member to be brought up as a young lady.” That family member was Lord Chief Justice Mansfield, the most powerful magistrate in the land, who ruled on several landmark slavery cases. About 15,000 blacks lived in London in the 18th century, some as servants, some as middle-class landowners. Despite widespread prejudice, even marriage between blacks and whites was not condemned “so long as it did not cross the class divide.” But runaway slaves were still subject to capture and resold or returned to their former owners. The “trade in human flesh” flourished in Britain, where slaves were essential as labor on sugar plantations in the island colonies. Despite—or, Byrne speculates, because of—Mansfield’s widely known affection for Dido, the judge proved cautious in his decisions, frustrating such ardent abolitionists as Granville Sharp, who sued for the rights of captured slaves. Ultimately, Mansfield agreed: Slavery, he wrote, “is so odious that nothing can be suffered to support it but positive law.”
Byrne brings to this brief history an eye for telling details of daily life, slaveholders’ unthinkable cruelty, and the fervent work of a few good men and women who changed their world.Pub Date: April 15, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-06-231077-4
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Perennial/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: March 28, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2014
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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