A much-needed and sure-to-be-influential addition to the literature of African enslavement.
Wide-ranging survey of the many ways in which enslaved Africans and their descendants resisted their captors.
Toussaint L’Ouverture, who led the Haitian war of independence against France, is well known. A young Black servant from Guadeloupe named Solitude is not, though she fought against French colonial forces there. Executed in 1802, Solitude now has a statue in Paris, “the first-ever dedicated to a black woman in the French capital,” as Mauritian historian Hazareesingh writes. Ironically, the French also imposed economic sanctions on free Haiti soon after, demanding indemnities that have crippled the country ever since; as Hazareesingh notes, “the economist Thomas Piketty calculated in 2020 that the Haitians are owed $28 billion by the French government as restitution for the debts incurred for their independence payments.” Rebellions against enslavement took many forms. By the author’s reckoning, hundreds of mutinies occurred on ships in the Middle Passage, among the first known of them a 1532 revolt on a Portuguese ship where 80 captives seized control and sailed back to the coast of Benin. Another form of rebellion took place in Brazil, Panama, and elsewhere, in which enslaved people escaped, formed multiethnic communities that included “Amerindians and poor whites fleeing from the violence of colonial society, destitutes, family outcasts, and those—such as Jews and African priestesses—persecuted for their spiritual beliefs.” And then, most worrisome to slaveholders, there were outright revolts such as that mounted by Nat Turner in Virginia in 1831, as well as armed bands that helped free recaptured slaves fleeing to Canada on the Underground Railroad—one of them led by Harriet Tubman. Ironically, Hazareesingh notes, most of these acts of rebellion and resistance, while “integral to the practice of Atlantic slavery, and an inescapable part of it,” have often been forgotten, history having tended to congratulate white abolitionists as the sole liberators, a condescending error that this book corrects.
A much-needed and sure-to-be-influential addition to the literature of African enslavement.Pub Date: today
ISBN: 9780374611071
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: Oct. 10, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.
Greed, depravity, and serial murder in 1920s Oklahoma.
During that time, enrolled members of the Osage Indian nation were among the wealthiest people per capita in the world. The rich oil fields beneath their reservation brought millions of dollars into the tribe annually, distributed to tribal members holding "headrights" that could not be bought or sold but only inherited. This vast wealth attracted the attention of unscrupulous whites who found ways to divert it to themselves by marrying Osage women or by having Osage declared legally incompetent so the whites could fleece them through the administration of their estates. For some, however, these deceptive tactics were not enough, and a plague of violent death—by shooting, poison, orchestrated automobile accident, and bombing—began to decimate the Osage in what they came to call the "Reign of Terror." Corrupt and incompetent law enforcement and judicial systems ensured that the perpetrators were never found or punished until the young J. Edgar Hoover saw cracking these cases as a means of burnishing the reputation of the newly professionalized FBI. Bestselling New Yorkerstaff writer Grann (The Devil and Sherlock Holmes: Tales of Murder, Madness, and Obsession, 2010, etc.) follows Special Agent Tom White and his assistants as they track the killers of one extended Osage family through a closed local culture of greed, bigotry, and lies in pursuit of protection for the survivors and justice for the dead. But he doesn't stop there; relying almost entirely on primary and unpublished sources, the author goes on to expose a web of conspiracy and corruption that extended far wider than even the FBI ever suspected. This page-turner surges forward with the pacing of a true-crime thriller, elevated by Grann's crisp and evocative prose and enhanced by dozens of period photographs.
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.Pub Date: April 18, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-385-53424-6
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2017
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
A short, smart analysis of perhaps the most famous passage in American history reveals its potency and unfulfilled promise.
Words that made a nation.
Isaacson is known for expansive biographies of great thinkers (and Elon Musk), but here he pens a succinct, stimulating commentary on the Founding Fathers’ ode to “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” His close reading of the Declaration of Independence’s second sentence, published to mark the 250th anniversary of the document’s adoption, doesn’t downplay its “moral contradiction.” Thomas Jefferson enslaved hundreds of people yet called slavery “a cruel war against human nature” in his first draft of the Declaration. All but 15 of the document’s 56 signers owned enslaved people. While the sentence in question asserted “all men are created equal” and possess “unalienable rights,” the Founders “consciously and intentionally” excluded women, Native Americans, and enslaved people. And yet the sentence is powerful, Isaacson writes, because it names a young nation’s “aspirations.” He mounts a solid defense of what ought to be shared goals, among them economic fairness, “moral compassion,” and a willingness to compromise. “Democracy depends on this,” he writes. Isaacson is excellent when explaining how Enlightenment intellectuals abroad influenced the founders. Benjamin Franklin, one of the Declaration’s “five-person drafting committee,” stayed in David Hume’s home for a month in the early 1770s, “discussing ideas of natural rights” with the Scottish philosopher. Also strong is Isaacson’s discussion of the “edits and tweaks” made to Jefferson’s draft. As recommended by Franklin and others, the changes were substantial, leaving Jefferson “distraught.” Franklin, who emerges as the book’s hero, helped establish municipal services, founded a library, and encouraged religious diversity—the kind of civic-mindedness that we could use more of today, Isaacson reminds us.
A short, smart analysis of perhaps the most famous passage in American history reveals its potency and unfulfilled promise.Pub Date: Nov. 18, 2025
ISBN: 9781982181314
Page Count: 80
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Aug. 29, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
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