Reviews

The prose is very dense. Lovely, but too dense for half-listening to while driving, haha. I need to come back to this book when I can read rather than listen.

stitching_ghost's review against another edition

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5.0

Fowler did a phenomenal job of both revealing aspects of history that are often ignored or obscured but also of making it eminently readable and engaging. Neither date heavy nor burdened by academic jargon it seems everything about this book was fine tuned to be accessible to any reader.

juliaehill's review against another edition

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3.0

This book was incredibly ambitious. I appreciated the author's approach to focusing on lesser-known stories from Black history in the U.S. and Africa, and he is clearly enthusiastic about the topic. This book really shone when it went into detail about an event or individual story, however, it often made broad leaps across time and was over-reliant on grandiose language and sweeping turns of phrase. This would be a great book for someone seeking an introduction to Black history, but I've read a lot of historical books in this vein, so a lot was familiar to me and it dragged on a bit too much for me to love it.

maddy_11's review against another edition

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dark informative inspiring slow-paced

4.5

Essential reading

katieproctorbooks's review against another edition

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4.0

This was good- I loved the stories about people I’d never heard of before.

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