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
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 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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