This historical account of the great slave rebellion in Haiti in the 1790's, in one sense, made me think of the mostly disastrous American military invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan. In both cases, it was a question of trying to control indigenous political and cultural turmoil with outs...
In 1791, Saint Domingue was both the richest and cruelest colony in the Western Hemisphere; more than a third of African slaves died within a few years of their arrival there. Thirteen years later, Haitian rebels declared independence from France after the first--and only--successful slave revolu...
When writers become obsessed with their subject matter, the final result can come out as relentless raving, or, as in this case, develop into total and uncompromising immersion.This second volume of Bell's Toussaint Louverture trilogy is as thoroughly mesmerizing as the first. Covering an eight...
I almost clicked one star for this one. I did it! I clicked one star! Maybe I should go back and give the Max Allan Collins books one star, too, but they at least succeed in being an entertaining enough piece of genre fiction. This book doesn't succeed there at all. And it wasn't because I th...
In ten sharply drawn tales, Madison Smartt Bell expands his masterly, inventive, and deftly textured fictional landscape to portray a collection of America's dispossessed characters. "Barking Man is a humane and mature book, the work of an important and talented writer".--The New York Times Book ...
The first is an anecdotal account of events, most of which Isaac personally witnessed, during the invasion of Toussaint's Saint Domingue by Napoleon Bonaparte's army. The second, though less complete and more fragmentary than the other, is almost the only source available on Toussaint's ancestry ...
It was already warm and he wore no jacket, just linsey breeches and a pullover shirt with the lace hanging loose at the throat. He beat a straw hat against his thigh as he walked. When he came out of the grove of oaks that shaded his house he was walking down a double row of cabins in the quarter...
He shifted slightly from foot to foot, and every few minutes he twisted his torso to the rear, to stretch his lower back, which hurt a little. Down the double staircase from the long open concrete barn in which he’d spent the night, the park was empty, more or less. The ragged shrubbery rattled i...
We never showed the blade to either of our parents. The Mom-thing would have taken it away for fear we’d harm ourselves, we thought, and Dad would have wanted to sell it as a rarity.It had come a long way and both of us knew it. Terrell, ordinarily no scholar, went to the library and boned up. Th...