Here, for Cottman, a political writer with the Washington Post, the discovery of the wreck of a slave ship off the Florida coast becomes the launching point for a sometimes lyrical, sometimes graphic journey into the horrific lost world of the transatlantic slave trade. In 1700, the Henrietta Marie, an English slave ship, sank in a hurricane off the Florida keys after unloading its cargo in Jamaica. In 1973, Moe Molinar, a treasure hunter, found the wreck. Divers in 1983 retrieved piles of iron shackles, some small enough for children, that became highly publicized reminders of the barbarous cruelty of slavery. Cottman, a scuba enthusiast, returned in 1993 as a member of the National Association of Black Scuba Divers to install a monument to the slaves on the site of the wreck. For him and the other African-American divers, the monument installation was a deeply spiritual experience, in which they palpably felt the presence of the lost souls of the slaves. Cottman traces the slave ship to an ancient foundry site in England, where iron shackles were made; to Jamaica, where he treks over the plantations farmed by the slaves and their descendants; and to GorÇe Island in Africa, where slaves were kept in brutal conditions prior to passing through the “Door of No Return” en route to slave ships. Cottman’s most important journey, though, is spiritual: meditating on the terrible sufferings of Africans in the holds of slave ships, he feels anger, but even stronger is his pride in the resilience of his people. Going beyond historical sources in visualizing the experiences of the slavers and the enslaved, he expresses the hope that finds like the Henrietta Marie will spark a renewed interest in learning about slavery and the slave trade, and engender a liberating dialogue among the races on this shared history and its implications. A gripping and emotionally wrenching, journey into America’s forgotten African holocaust. (Author tour)
Pub Date: Jan. 13, 1999
ISBN: 0-517-70328-9
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Harmony
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 1998
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
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