A welcome history of defiance and survival.
Transcontinental trauma and its legacy.
Of the 10.7 million Africans displaced to the Americas between the 16th and late 19th centuries, 103 landed in Alabama in July 1860 on the Clotilda. Infamous as the last slave ship to arrive in the U.S., the Clotilda has been the subject of several recent histories and a documentary, which, along with rich archival sources, inform British historian Durkin’s vivid recounting. In searing detail, she relates the circumstances of the Africans’ capture by Dahomeyan kidnappers, the cruelty they endured as enslaved people, and their valiant efforts to assert their West African heritage when they finally were freed. After a long incarceration in Africa as they waited for slave buyers to arrive, family members were forcibly separated—mothers from infants, husbands from wives—and those chosen were stripped and crammed into the ship’s hold for a horrific ocean journey. Although the slave trade had been outlawed in the U.S. since 1808, bans were poorly enforced. A group of pro-slavery conspirators funded the voyage; a wily captain navigated the ship to avoid detection; and when the crew threatened mutiny, they were bribed and threatened into submission. With the Africans offloaded, the Clotilda was set on fire, and its human cargo hidden on a plantation. Although the trafficking scheme soon became known, government officials failed to find the Africans or prosecute the conspirators. One by one, enslavers came to make their purchases. Durkin depicts the “incessant labour and violence” and the culture of virulent racism they found as freed men and women. Nevertheless, they endured: Some established a “self-sufficient community” they called Africa Town. They defied white efforts to keep them from voting, and they married, owned land, and raised families. Generations later, their descendants became active in the civil rights movement. The book includes maps, photos, and artwork.
A welcome history of defiance and survival.Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2024
ISBN: 9780063072992
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Sept. 28, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2023
A fierce, penetrating, and empowering call for change.
Artist and activist Vaid-Menon demonstrates how the normativity of the gender binary represses creativity and inflicts physical and emotional violence.
The author, whose parents emigrated from India, writes about how enforcement of the gender binary begins before birth and affects people in all stages of life, with people of color being especially vulnerable due to Western conceptions of gender as binary. Gender assignments create a narrative for how a person should behave, what they are allowed to like or wear, and how they express themself. Punishment of nonconformity leads to an inseparable link between gender and shame. Vaid-Menon challenges familiar arguments against gender nonconformity, breaking them down into four categories—dismissal, inconvenience, biology, and the slippery slope (fear of the consequences of acceptance). Headers in bold font create an accessible navigation experience from one analysis to the next. The prose maintains a conversational tone that feels as intimate and vulnerable as talking with a best friend. At the same time, the author's turns of phrase in moments of deep insight ring with precision and poetry. In one reflection, they write, “the most lethal part of the human body is not the fist; it is the eye. What people see and how people see it has everything to do with power.” While this short essay speaks honestly of pain and injustice, it concludes with encouragement and an invitation into a future that celebrates transformation.
A fierce, penetrating, and empowering call for change. (writing prompt) (Nonfiction. 14-adult)Pub Date: June 2, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-593-09465-5
Page Count: 64
Publisher: Penguin Workshop
Review Posted Online: March 14, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2020
A top-notch political memoir and serious exercise in practical politics for every reader.
In the first volume of his presidential memoir, Obama recounts the hard path to the White House.
In this long, often surprisingly candid narrative, Obama depicts a callow youth spent playing basketball and “getting loaded,” his early reading of difficult authors serving as a way to impress coed classmates. (“As a strategy for picking up girls, my pseudo-intellectualism proved mostly worthless,” he admits.) Yet seriousness did come to him in time and, with it, the conviction that America could live up to its stated aspirations. His early political role as an Illinois state senator, itself an unlikely victory, was not big enough to contain Obama’s early ambition, nor was his term as U.S. Senator. Only the presidency would do, a path he painstakingly carved out, vote by vote and speech by careful speech. As he writes, “By nature I’m a deliberate speaker, which, by the standards of presidential candidates, helped keep my gaffe quotient relatively low.” The author speaks freely about the many obstacles of the race—not just the question of race and racism itself, but also the rise, with “potent disruptor” Sarah Palin, of a know-nothingism that would manifest itself in an obdurate, ideologically driven Republican legislature. Not to mention the meddlings of Donald Trump, who turns up in this volume for his idiotic “birther” campaign while simultaneously fishing for a contract to build “a beautiful ballroom” on the White House lawn. A born moderate, Obama allows that he might not have been ideological enough in the face of Mitch McConnell, whose primary concern was then “clawing [his] way back to power.” Indeed, one of the most compelling aspects of the book, as smoothly written as his previous books, is Obama’s cleareyed scene-setting for how the political landscape would become so fractured—surely a topic he’ll expand on in the next volume.
A top-notch political memoir and serious exercise in practical politics for every reader.Pub Date: Nov. 17, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-5247-6316-9
Page Count: 768
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 15, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2020
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