A moving, significant narrative that affords both an elegantly produced glimpse of 19th-century prison life and a new...
An obscure, newly unearthed 19th-century memoir details the prison life of an African-American inmate.
Discovered at an estate sale by a rare book dealer and authenticated by a Yale curating team, Reed’s handwritten, hand-sewn manuscript dated 1858 is now duly recognized with publication in its entirety. A lengthy discussion provided by the book’s editor, Caleb Smith, supplies vital details on the lengths taken to authenticate the document’s history and its genesis as the first-known penitentiary narrative by an African-American writer. Smith pieces together Reed’s life through prison records and varied archival sources to establish a complementary preface to the author’s narrative self-portrait. Written for public consumption, Reed’s lyrical, dramatic prose describes his incremental descent into the New York penal system and a life in legal captivity, by way of a rebellious youth tarnished by the death of his father and a cursory upbringing by a struggling, widowed mother who sent him to work on a farm at a young age. This is the first of three stories of imprisonment Reed depicts. Defiant and uncooperative, he writes of being severely beaten by the farmer, who then met his demise during a revenge plot, which landed the author in the New York House of Refuge reformatory, his second confinement, at 12. Reed toiled and received an education but remained defiant, as evidenced by a botched escape attempt with other inmates. Returning to the clutches of sadistic constables, the author describes their corporal punishments in feverish detail. A repetitive pattern of larcenies and thefts earned him subsequent sentences served at the Auburn state penitentiary during the unreformed antebellum years; Reed endured frequent episodes of dehumanizing punishment. “Rendered with a haunting eloquence,” much of the memoir’s allure is derived from Reed’s poetic, lyrical, passionate voice.
A moving, significant narrative that affords both an elegantly produced glimpse of 19th-century prison life and a new chapter in African-American history through a convict’s eyes.Pub Date: Jan. 26, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9709-5
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2015
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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