For more than three centuries, slave ships carried millions of people from the coasts of Africa to the New World. In The Slave Ship, award-winning historian Marcus Rediker creates an unprecedented history of these vessels and the human drama acted out on their rolling decks. Rediker restores the slave ship to its rightful place alongside the plantation as a formative institution of slavery, as a place where a profound and still haunting history of race, class, and m… More >>
The Slave Ship: A Human History
Certainly no new information contained here and I believe his one and only motive is reached in the final pages of the document when he calls for reparations from the federal government.
That is the book’s agenda. No other purpose is present.
Rating: 1 / 5
While when reduced to its essentials, the information provided by this text illuminates the slave trade, the text, as a text – particularly one written by an educator, is deplorable.
The presentation lacks cohesion, order and clarity. Incidents are highly repetitive and out of sequence. If he mentions “speculum oris” once he mentions it a dozen times but each time as though it were the first. Was there any time put into editing this book? If this were a doctoral submission it would certainly have been rejected and submitted for rewriting before acceptance. As with so many books these days, they pubish anything with surface dash and little proper substantive arrangement.
Rating: 1 / 5
This book could have been much better than the end product. The author approached the topic with a great knowledge, then proceeded to write about it in an almost haphazard manner. The topics seem to smash back and forth with the rocking of the ship. He starts with excerpts from diaries, goes to the African coast, out to water, then back to Africa inland. After this, we learn of how they recruited sailors back in jolly old England. Seems to me you build, recruit, go to Africa, then to the colonies and back to England. Why can’t the book follow the same timeline? There is much talk to the Middle Passage without explaining what the Beginning Passage or the Final Passage is. The ships are described somewhat in that it talks of the general layout, but more detail would have been appreciated. How much space did the captain’s bunk have compared to the slaves’ quarters? To the crews’ quarters? They built barricados on deck but how, how tall, and how wide? How could it contain and restrain hundreds of slaves? Diagrams are crucial yet excluded. The author also goes back and forth between preaching and sympathizing, screaming the horrors of the industry then showing empathy with the participants. I would have appreciated one opinion where he “stuck to it”. Pardoning the pun, I felt a little seasick after completing the book. I wish Rediker would have approached the topic as either a textbook or a novel. Instead it is an odd amalgam of the two, and very difficult to wade through. His lack of direction does not give the topic proper justice.
Rating: 2 / 5
I probably overuse that word in my book reviews, and “tiresome” or “wearisome” or “humdrum” could be substituted, but many authors are just not good writers. I have no doubt this guy did the research and knows the subject matter, but he doesn’t sustain, yet alone build upon, my interest in it. He gets sidetracked, bogged down in detail, and makes the same points over and over in a dry narrative. He makes no effort to put 17th and 18th century African slavery in the context of world history.
But I have to say he at least tries to stay with the facts and avoid excessive moralizing. For that I was thankful.
Rating: 2 / 5
The research conducted was incredible. But the writing was very choppy and uneven. The stories struggled to get out from within the author’s chosen format. I was still moved and disturbed by the stories, but the impact was muted with the haphazard way the author presented the material. My wife couldn’t finish the book because she was annoyed with the back and forth.
Rating: 3 / 5