A volume of passionate, if sometimes-stilted, writings rich in historical and scholarly interest.
Oppression, carnage, and heroism course through writings inspired by the Haitian revolution in this sprawling anthology.
Editors and translators Daut, Pierrot, and Rohrleitner collect more than 200 excerpts of novels, stories, poems, and plays dating from 1787 to 1899 and set during—or touching on—the 13-year revolt of enslaved people who won Haiti its independence from France in 1804. The struggle fed on revolutionary enthusiasms, challenged White supremacy, and included horrific massacres. It also provoked complex responses from writers worldwide, broadly surveyed. Most selections are by Europeans who view the Haitian revolution with mixed feelings. Liberals see it as a beacon of freedom (“Thy friends are exultations, agonies / And love, and man’s unconquerable mind,” rhapsodizes William Wordsworth’s ode to the Haitian general Toussaint Louverture); romantics use it as a setting for adventure stories; and dispossessed French colonists harp on revolutionary terror and exile. Some writers display conflicting impulses; in one excerpt, Victor Hugo emphasizes the nobility of a formerly enslaved person who defends a White family, while in another passage he characterizes Haitians as subhuman. Overall, the writings here often feel overwrought and unwieldy under their burdens of ideology and 19th-century melodrama. Still, readers interested in Haiti and the intersection of literature and politics will find many works engrossing. The Haitian writers, for example, are shown to view the revolution through the lens of liberation: “All that is left is hatred and we only have one rallying cry: death!” declares a rebel to the owners of a plantation house he’s set ablaze in Ignace Nau’s story “An Episode of the Revolution.” Others effectively express patriotism tempered with misgivings: “With his brothers’ blood he stained the history / Of our revolution! / Yet, he was beautiful, when with sword held up high, / He cried out: O sweet liberty, your day is coming nigh!” writes poet Coriolan Ardouin of revolutionary-turned-dictator Jean-Jacques Dessalines. The editors provide extensive biographical notes on each author, and Daut, a professor of African diaspora studies at the University of Virginia, contributes an insightful introduction.
A volume of passionate, if sometimes-stilted, writings rich in historical and scholarly interest.Pub Date: Jan. 25, 2022
ISBN: 978-0-8139-4569-9
Page Count: 1008
Publisher: Univ. of Virginia
Review Posted Online: Feb. 11, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2022
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
FANTASY | SHORT STORIES | WORLD |
BOOK REVIEW
When anyone attempts to enhance and reformat a book that’s already sold more than five million copies, there’s some risk...
The iPad adaption of Boynton’s bestselling board book surveys animals and the sounds they make.
When anyone attempts to enhance and reformat a book that’s already sold more than five million copies, there’s some risk involved. What if it doesn’t translate well? Worse yet, what if it flops? Fortunately, Loud Crow Interactive and Boynton don’t have to worry about that. There’s no hint of a sophomore slump in this second installment of the Boynton Moo Media series. Much like its predecessor, The Going to Bed Book (2011), this app adapts the illustrator’s trademark creatures for iPad in a way few other developers can. The animals are fluid and pliable, which is no small feat given that they’re on a flat display. Readers can jiggle them, hurl them off screen, elicit animal sounds and in some cases make them sing (in a perfect inverted triad!). Melodic violin music accompanies the entire story, which is deftly narrated by Boynton’s son, Keith. In addition to the author’s simple yet charming prose there are little surprises sprinkled throughout that extend the wit that’s won countless babies and parents over in paper form.Pub Date: April 19, 2011
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: -
Publisher: Loud Crow Interactive
Review Posted Online: May 17, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2011
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
It's being called a novel, but it is more a hybrid: short-stories/essays/confessions about the Vietnam War—the subject that O'Brien reasonably comes back to with every book. Some of these stories/memoirs are very good in their starkness and factualness: the title piece, about what a foot soldier actually has on him (weights included) at any given time, lends a palpability that makes the emotional freight (fear, horror, guilt) correspond superbly. Maybe the most moving piece here is "On The Rainy River," about a draftee's ambivalence about going, and how he decided to go: "I would go to war—I would kill and maybe die—because I was embarrassed not to." But so much else is so structurally coy that real effects are muted and disadvantaged: O'Brien is writing a book more about earnestness than about war, and the peekaboos of this isn't really me but of course it truly is serve no true purpose. They make this an annoyingly arty book, hiding more than not behind Hemingwayesque time-signatures and puerile repetitions about war (and memory and everything else, for that matter) being hell and heaven both. A disappointment.
Pub Date: March 28, 1990
ISBN: 0618706410
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
Review Posted Online: Oct. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 1990
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