Showing posts with label slavery. Show all posts
Showing posts with label slavery. Show all posts
Jun 1, 2018
May 1, 2017
Nov 1, 2016
Oct 1, 2016
Feb 5, 2015
Hidden girl - Shyima Hall
Summary: The author relates how she was sold by poor parents into slavery and forced to endure brutal servitude in California until a neighbor's anonymous call to the police began her journey to freedom and her subsequent efforts to fight for child slaves.
Booklist Reviews
Hall was eight years old when her impoverished Egyptian parents sold her to a wealthy couple. The life of domestic slavery that followed was one of endless labor and physical and verbal abuse. Her experiences don't improve when her captors immigrate to the U.S., smuggling her in with them. Almost two years pass before her plight is discovered, and she is freed. But her difficulties don't end there. As a result of never having been educated, she is illiterate, can't speak English, and can't even tell time. Accordingly, school is an ordeal and the foster homes in which she lives are often problematic. The balance of this affecting and enlightening memoir tells the story of how she survived and, ultimately, thrived. Unfortunately, her story is not unique. She points out that there are almost 43,000 slaves in the U.S. at any given time. By giving a face to one hidden girl, Hall has given a face to many. This is an excellent book for both individual reading and classroom use. Also suggest Rosanne Hawke's Spirit of a Mountain Wolf, reviewed in this issue, for a fictionalized view of child slavery. Copyright 2014 Booklist Reviews.
Check Availability
Feb 1, 2014
The invention of wings - Sue Monk Kidd
Summary: "The story follows Hetty 'Handful' Grimke, a Charleston slave, and Sarah, the daughter of the wealthy Grimke family. The novel begins on Sarah's eleventh birthday, when she is given ownership over Handful, who is to be her handmaid. "The Invention of Wings" follows the next thirty-five years of their lives. Inspired in part by the historical figure of Sarah Grimke (a feminist, suffragist and, importantly, an abolitionist), Kidd allows herself to go beyond the record to flesh out the inner lives of all the characters, both real and imagined"-- Provided by publisher.
Booklist Reviews
*Starred Review* Inspired by the true story of early-nineteenth-century abolitionist and suffragist Sarah Grimké, Kidd paints a moving portrait of two women inextricably linked by the horrors of slavery. Sarah, daughter of a wealthy South Carolina plantation owner, exhibits an independent spirit and strong belief in the equality of all. Thwarted from her dreams of becoming a lawyer, she struggles throughout life to find an outlet for her convictions. Handful, a slave in the Grimké household, displays a sharp intellect and brave, rebellious disposition. She maintains a compliant exterior, while planning for a brighter future. Told in first person, the chapters alternate between the two main characters' perspectives, as we follow their unlikely friendship (characterized by both respect and resentment) from childhood to middle age. While their pain and struggle cannot be equated, both women strive to be set free—Sarah from the bonds of patriarchy and Southern bigotry, and Handful from the inhuman bonds of slavery. Kidd is a master storyteller, and, with smooth and graceful prose, she immerses the reader in the lives of these fascinating women as they navigate religion, family drama, slave revolts, and the abolitionist movement. HIGH-DEMAND BACKSTORY: Beginning with her phenomenally successful debut, The Secret Life of Bees (2002), Kidd's novels have found an intense readership among library patrons, who will be eager to get their hands on her latest one. Copyright 2013 Booklist Reviews.
Check Availability
Aug 1, 2012
The astonishing life of Octavian Nothing: The pox party - M.T. Anderson
Summary: Various diaries, letters, and other manuscripts chronicle the experiences of Octavian, a young African American, from birth to age sixteen, as he is brought up as part of a science experiment in the years leading up to and during the Revolutionary War.
Kirkus Reviews
A historical novel of prodigious scope, power and insight, set against the backdrop of the Revolutionary War. Readers are seduced by a gothic introduction to the child Octavian, whose bizarre situation is both lavish and eerie. Octavian is domiciled with a gentleman scholar at the "College of Lucidity." A sentient being, he is a living experiment, from his classical education to the notated measurement of his bodily intake and output; as such, the study will degenerate from earnest scholarly investigation to calculated sociopolitical propaganda. Upon learning that he's a slave, Octavian resolves to prove his excellence. But events force the destitute College to depend on a new benefactor who demands research that proves the inferiority of the black race. Like many Africans, Octavian runs away, joining the Revolutionary army, which fights for "liberty," while ironically never assuring slaves freedom. Written in a richly faithful 18th-century style, the revelations of Octavian's increasingly degraded circumstances slowly, horrifyingly unfold to the reader as they do to Octavian. The cover's gruesomely masked Octavian epitomizes a nation choking on its own hypocrisy. This is the Revolutionary War seen at its intersection with slavery through a disturbingly original lens. (Historical fiction. YA-adult) Copyright Kirkus 2006 Kirkus/BPI Communications. All rights reserved.
Check Availability
Aug 3, 2010
Island beneath the sea: a novel - Isabel Allende
Island beneath the sea: a novel - Allende, Isabel
Summary: The story of a mulatta woman, a slave and concubine, determined to take control of her own destiny in a society where that would seem impossible"--Provided by publisher.
Booklist Reviews
*Starred Review* Allende, an entrancing and astute storyteller cherished the world over, returns to historical fiction to portray another resilient woman whose life embodies the complex forces at work in the bloody forging of the New World. Zarité, called Tété, is born into slavery in the colony of Saint-Domingue, where enslaved Africans are worked to death by the thousands, and European men prey on women of color. So it is with Tété and her "master," the deeply conflicted plantation owner Toulouse Valmorain, who relies on her for everything from coerced sex to caring for his demented first wife, his legitimate son, and their off-the-record daughter. When the slave uprising that gives birth to the free black republic of Haiti erupts, Toulouse, Tété, and the children flee to Cuba, then to New Orleans. In a many-faceted plot, Allende animates irresistible characters authentic in their emotional turmoil and pragmatic adaptability. She also captures the racial, sexual, and entrepreneurial dynamics of each society in sensuous detail while masterfully dramatizing the psychic wounds of slavery. Sexually explicit, Allende is grace incarnate in her evocations of the spiritual energy that still sustains the beleaguered people of Haiti and New Orleans. Demand will be high for this transporting, remarkably topical novel of men and women of courage risking all for liberty. Copyright 2010 Booklist Reviews.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)