Reviews

Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass by Frederick Douglass

radikaliseradgroda's review against another edition

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4.0

Maybe my standards are a bit lowered by just having read Mrs. Rowlandson, but this is such a strong book! The clarity and pathos is far beyond the contemporaries I've read, not to mention that the author was writing about his own lived experience. I was dreading picking this one up and then I finished it in one go, while crying. I don't usually cry when I'm reading for uni because I'm busy taking notes, but this was something else.

samsmith18's review against another edition

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emotional hopeful informative inspiring sad

5.0

thesimplereader's review against another edition

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3.0

I have been required to read this book on two different occasions for academic settings, and I can honestly say that I enjoyed it both times. It is truly an intellectual work with griping contents that will put readers in a time of struggle and triumph throughout Mr. Douglass's life.

theseventhl's review against another edition

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5.0

Utterly essential reading for Americans who soon forget that not long ago, men and women like Douglass were kept in human bondage and seen as mere property, with no rights to speak of, left at the mercy of their masters, and all because of the color of their skin. Douglass' account is a haunting detailed personal account of one of - if not the - darkest era in United States history.

bookwormy614's review against another edition

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3.0

I read this because it is important. However, I did not enjoy it. Important historical figure who made great change but not enjoyable as there is nothing about slavery that is enjoyable.

tania_os's review against another edition

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adventurous challenging dark informative inspiring reflective tense fast-paced

4.0

eburgardt's review against another edition

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dark hopeful informative reflective tense medium-paced

4.0

  • Southern White Protestantism is unsalvageable!
  • “I assert most unhesitatingly, that the religion of the south is a mere covering for the most horrid crimes,—a justifier of the most appalling barbarity,—a sanctifier of the most hateful frauds,—and a dark shelter under which the darkest, foulest, grossest, and most infernal deeds of slaveholders find the strongest protection. Were I to be again reduced to the chains of slavery, next to that enslavement, I should regard being the slave of a religious master the greatest calamity that could befall me.”

awilsonmomof2's review against another edition

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4.0

From start to finish, this short narrative was an excellent yet sad account of a very VERY horrible time in our US history....especially his focus on the actions of supposed Christians of the time. I drive through Easton and Talbot county all the time when home in the US. Can't wait to spend some time visiting some of his memorials and also reading more from him.

ralowe's review against another edition

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5.0

the tension around representation comes up here. narration for whom? what is redundant in a narrative drawn from intimate knowing of lived experience? or is consciousness forever vexingly unattainable because something cannot be both known and told simultaneously? something is always cloyingly unreal in the telling of black lives, there is always doubt, even when something has been lived through, it eternally defies narration as the narrator and the narrated fall under suspicion. memory exists in excess of the accountable, the recountable. words fail douglass: "It was a most terrible spectacle. I wish I could commit to paper the feelings with which I beheld it." what exhausts me with sadness is witnessing douglass toil in the frame of humanity, attempting to reconcile the black and the white in some design of common sociality, emblazoned "america." i want to ask who really wrote this? what blackness must be is lessened under terror for its own survival. he's puzzling how the slavemaster can serve the same god as the slave: how's about some fucking decency? i totally feel him on that. i mean you could totally just not kidnap, enslave and fuck with people. am i right? but, the mechanisms of white supremacy are so fundamental to modernity that, as blackness living in amerikkka knows, it far outlives the supposed formal institutional disappearance of chattel slavery. i'm reading this book for the first time, although i have a very fly frederick douglass t-shirt and have been obsessed with the dilemma for the radical imagination around representation/surveillance, bad faith and blackness. does self-possession with and against traumatic memory challenge the status of representational art/politics as either productive or refuge? there's an irresistible anecdote about the white-on-black image of frederick douglass on the t-shirt i have, where the person who gave it to me assumed that "he was some white guy;" the classic image looks like something on dollar bills, plus the white ink on black fabric doesn't help. but this isn't really what i want to say when i talk about (mis)representation. more like the ineffable terror of enslavement reduced to sentimentality. but sentimentality gets a bum rap, for all the passages of seemingly dissembling florid high gothic reverie: it's "master's tools" spread eagle for the discerning appraisal of who? the "covey brawl" chapter would contradict this summation. but are not these inspiring scenes of the very most equivocal significance for the despairing oppressed black as much as the relieved well-intentioned liberal? enslaved humanity is a structural impossibility, cruelty is only quantifiable in the reflection of analogy to a legitimate subject, not in itself: you can't be cruel to an object, you can only be cruel to an object. i couldn't stop thinking of this aporia, especially during the would-be inspirational scenes. saidiya hartman proved this very well in scenes of subjection. that structural ambivalence has always been maddening to me. douglass calls attention to this in the last chapter, where saying too much becomes akin to doing too much. i wonder if this whole narrative is a document to some future removed humanity to whom moral appeals might be successfully made, perhaps living in a context with no comparable oppressive structure, an impartial audience. it feels redundant to whoever would hold stake existing in a slaveholding society. this beautifully rendered record mystifies me. when is the proper time and place for an "Upperground Railroad?"

mader716's review against another edition

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hopeful informative reflective medium-paced

4.0