An eminently readable book that offers contemporary readers valuable insights into racial relations of centuries past.
An intriguing history of Africans in Tudor England.
Kaufmann (Senior Research Fellow/Institute for Commonwealth Studies, Univ. of London) presents the stories of 10 African men and women engaged in a variety of occupations, from trumpeter to trader. The author argues that the common perception that all Africans were enslaved by the British is erroneous and that Renaissance England had many free Africans who were part of the social fabric. “Despite the insatiable appetite for all things Tudor, from raunchy television series to bath ducks modelled as Henry VIII and Anne Boleyn,” she writes, “the existence of the Black Tudors is little known.” Through meticulous archival research, Kaufmann creates compelling portraits of her subjects, including a trumpet player at Henry VIII’s court, a salvage diver, a circumnavigator, a porter, a silk weaver, a Moroccan convert, a prince involved in trade negotiations, a mariner, a woman involved in sex work, and an independent single woman. Since they left few documents behind, Kaufmann pieces together their histories from church records, references in various documents by influential Englishmen, literary works, paintings, and other sources. Each story is anchored in the social and political history of the time. Thus, readers learn much about Henry VIII’s courtiers; West African deep-sea divers, who used no diving equipment but could reach sunken ships to retrieve goods; Francis Drake and his treacherous ways; prostitution in Tudor and Stuart England; and the processes of silk weaving and dairy farming. The narrative is engaging, and the author’s argument about how Africans were generally accepted in Tudor England is persuasive. She provides a wealth of detail and only occasionally gets lost in minutiae, making the book a highly instructive history of an understudied part of Tudor society
An eminently readable book that offers contemporary readers valuable insights into racial relations of centuries past.Pub Date: Nov. 14, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-78607-184-2
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Oneworld Publications
Review Posted Online: Sept. 10, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2017
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
A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
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