A gripping tale and a sterling analysis of England’s first foray into the nastiest of human enterprises. (16 pp. b&w...
The swashbuckling, high-seas adventures of an English mariner who pioneered the enslavement of Africans, along the way enriching himself but earning history’s enduring censure.
Hazlewood (Savage: The Life and Times of Jemmy Button, 2001) crafts an engrossing, swift, and sanguinary narrative around Hawkyns, born circa 1532 into a wealthy Plymouth merchant family. He became a master sailor and a ferocious negotiator (cannon and sword were among his more persuasive tools), a man who sailed boldly into Spanish ports in the New World and forced the terrified denizens to trade (i.e., buy slaves) or suffer consequences that included burning homes, plundering local wealth, and killing temporizers. At the time Hawkyns’s sail first loomed on history’s horizon, Portugal and Spain enjoyed primacy in the slave trade between Africa and the Western Hemisphere, based on their arrangements with African leaders. Then the fearless Englishman arrived, using stealth and brutality to carve for his nation a profitable part of this market in humans. As Hazlewood points out, there was little objection anywhere to slavery on moral grounds. Queen Elizabeth, dancing delicately on history’s high wire, offered private support (she had other disturbing dishes on her plate: Mary, Queen of Scots; the powerful Spanish), and Hawkyns found willing investors. The author describes in great detail his first two very profitable ventures and the disastrous third one, during which he barely escaped with his life when the Spanish attacked him in Mexico. Hazlewood rightly points out, as well, the religious implications of all of this. Hawkyns’s Protestant men destroyed and desecrated Roman Catholic symbols and structures in the New World, and the Inquisitors later dealt harshly with some of the English they captured. The author also makes excellent use of some astonishing details, as when he describes English sailors fishing in a South American river for an alligator—and using one of their dogs as bait.
A gripping tale and a sterling analysis of England’s first foray into the nastiest of human enterprises. (16 pp. b&w photos, not seen)Pub Date: Dec. 1, 2004
ISBN: 0-06-621089-5
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2004
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
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
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