An intractable, unwieldy story both intimate and universal, handled expertly by Stuart.
The tortuous, unsweetened story of the author’s English forebear as he migrated to Barbados to grow rich from sugar and slavery.
Caribbean-born, English-educated Stuart (The Rose of Martinique: A Biography of Napoleon’s Josephine, 2004) examines the narrative of her ancestor George Ashby, a middling-born English migrant who bought a small plot in Barbados around 1640 and thrived from the bumper crop of sugar. Like many migrants of the time, Ashby was young, enterprising and possibly down on his luck, but determined to apply his “plantation skills” (he was a blacksmith by trade) to make a go in the wilds of the New World. Stuart adeptly re-creates the early life of a small farmer like Ashby, just as Barbados, a small island muscled out in the growing of tobacco by larger colonies like Virginia, took up the planting of sugar to spectacular success by the end of the 1640s, requiring more laborers and thereby prompting the replacement of indentured servants and natives with hardier, cheaper African slaves. The European migrants set aside any repugnance to slavery to make a profit, and Stuart effectively demonstrates how the organization of this “first slave society” in Barbados defined all aspects of the institution of slavery, setting the model for the rest of the British Americas. Ashby prospered by the purchase of slaves and more land, and Stuart traces over many generations and mixed parentages between master and slaves and shows how this uneasy relationship essentially created the complicated, rich, tragic legacy of the modern Caribbean.
An intractable, unwieldy story both intimate and universal, handled expertly by Stuart.Pub Date: Jan. 23, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-307-27283-6
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Nov. 18, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2012
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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