HAITI The Aftershocks of History By Laurent Dubois

Book review: 'The Psychopath Test' by Jon Ronson - Los Angles Times

a better written review and overview from the LA Times

The journalist looks at the psychopathy disorder and discovers that checklists and experts don't always agree on who is insane and who is normal.

May 19, 2011|By Carolyn Kellogg | Los Angeles Times

Running Down a Sanity Checklist By JANET MASLIN Published: May 16, 2011 NYT

a poorly written review from the NYT.....


Running Down a Sanity Checklist

By JANET MASLIN

Published: May 16, 2011

In “The Psychopath Test,” Jon Ronson takes his mistrust of psychiatry along on his expeditions, visiting people everywhere from prisons to the corridors of power.

Watered Whiskey: James Baldwin's Uncollected Writings

Carol Tavris on Barbara Ehrenreich’s Crusade

Haiti: The Duvaliers And Their Legacy by Elizabeth Abbott

Review

“Princess Noire” Chronicles Talent and Temperament of Nina Simone by Bijan C. Bayne

METHLAND The Death and Life of an American Small Town

In One Room, Many Advantages

The 'little red schoolhouse' of legend, whatever its flaws, made more sense than the warehouse-schools of today.

THE COLOR OF LIGHTNING By Paulette Jiles

NYT review

Texas Monthly Review

Amazon.com review

Poisoned Wells: The Dirty Politics of African Oil. Nicholas Shaxson. Palgrave Macmillan, 2008, 288 pp. $26.95.

"...Shaxson's journalistic account of the seamier side of African oil is less informative, although still a good read. Shaxson devotes little time to the actual players in the oil sector. Instead, he advances and documents the now-popular view that Africa's oil is mostly a curse on its economy and people, as the wealth it procures has unleashed greed and venality and produced growing inequality and environmental disaster. Each chapter of Shaxson's account tackles one dimension of this negative assessment with evocative vignettes and revealing individual portraits. His chapter on Nigeria demonstrates how oil wealth worsened the country's authoritarianism and corruption by focusing on the life and times of the Nigerian musician Fela Kuti. Another chapter examines how oil has enriched Equatorial Guinea's president for life, Teodoro Obiang Nguema Mbasogo..."

Walking On Water by Randall Kenan - Review by Walton Muyumba

WALKING ON WATER: Black American Lives at the Turn of the Twenty-First Century
Walton Muyumba

WALKING ON WATER: Black American Lives at the Turn of the Twenty-First Century By Randall Kenan Alfred A. Knopf, 1999 New York 672 pages Hardback: $30.00

Randall Kenan's new book, Walking on Water, is written in the tradition of classical American travel literature. Yet uniquely, this travelogue, historical archive, memoir, ethnographic survey, and literary documentary addresses the complexities inherent in discussions of identity and race.

The author is best known for his fiction: his novel, A Visitation of Spirits, and a critically acclaimed collection of stories, Let the Dead Bury Their Dead. The blend of his elegantly wrought prose and impeccable historical documentation makes Kenan's impulse for exploration resonate with importance.

Kenan's Walking on Water enterprise, eight years in the making, was ignited by this set of "basic" questions: What does it mean to be a Black American? What exactly is African American culture? Who is Black? All are extremely unruly questions to pose, let alone answer. Rather than sift through these complicated matters alone, Kenan presses others for their interpretations.

The author avoids the most redundant settings. Instead of dwelling on the fecundity of Chicago's "Blackness," he ventures to Grand Forks, N.D., and Coeur d'Alene, Idaho, for sounds from the "lower frequencies." Kenan travels to almost every regional quadrant and he introduces a cadre of folks -- artists, activists, students, and politicians -- whose narratives destabilize any notions of an "essential" Black experience or culture.

Kenan masterfully presents historical background for every area. He tells the story of the Black soldiers of the Army Corps of Engineers who built the most treacherous portion of the Alcan (the Alaskan-Canadian) highway. In San Francisco, Kenan ruminates on the cultural, political, and economic power of Mary Ellen Pleasant, confidante and financier behind the abolitionist, John Brown. Woven throughout is Kenan's voice guiding, suggesting, and surprising us with new ways to think about ourselves.

It is mind-boggling to read the multifarious explanations of what constitutes Blackness. From Clara Villarosa at the Hue-Man Experience Bookstore in Denver, to the Creoles and Black Frenchmen of Lafayette, La., to Herbert Heughan in Maine, there are no concrete answers to Kenan's questions. And yet, the variety of the voices transcribed to life by Kenan urge the reader to follow him to the book's end. Interestingly, Kenan may answer his interrogatives when he suggests that long before the term was coined, "Black culture was a postmodern culture; folks made it up as they went along. Therefore, who can be authentically Black, when every Black person holds the codes and blueprints of that Blackness?"

Indeed, it seems difficult to chart racial authenticity -- after all, isn't race a false category? There is no essential experience except for that ubiquitous moment when race is used by the "powers that be" to authorize, essentialize, ostracize, oppress, condemn, and murder black, brown, and beige bodies.

However, race -- Blackness in this case -- still has political necessity. There is a need for unity among Negroes to "band together against discrimination, to fight for parity, to safeguard against injustice inherently aimed at a person solely because of his or her skin color." Is the I snake swallowing or giving birth to itself?

One should take this book on, if for no other reason than to reconsidering how we imagine our individual relations to Blackness. Kenan extends the overtures made by recent, excellent memoirs like John Wideman's Fatheralong, Anthony Walton's Mississippi, and Deborah McDowell's Leaving Pipe Shop.

The remarkable quality of Kenan's book is that it is utterly his own, stylized and rendered in his unmistakable voice. It is buoyed by the clarity of the informants he includes within. Among other things, Walking on Water articulates that the attempt to work out our preoccupations with race and culture is attached to travel and exploration -- and that this remains a part of our American make-up. Walking on Water will become a movement in the journey worth revisiting again and again.

-- Walton Muyumba is a writer and a doctoral candidate, completing a dissertation on the philosophical aspects of the blues and African American literature at Indiana University.

COPYRIGHT 1999 Cox, Matthews & Associates
COPYRIGHT 2008 Gale, Cengage Learning


Walking on Water @ Amazon.com

Frederick Douglass. - book reviews

African American Review, Fall, 1994 by John Sekora

Although the English building on my campus is not at all prepossessing, it is served by businesses with grandiloquent names: Master Key, Master Lock, Master Chem, Master Towel, Master Door, Master Glass, Master Brick, Master Casting, and Master Temp. Maintenance for the building--it lacks sufficient stature to be a Hall--is contracted to Master Craftsmen, repairs to Master Builders and Master Plumbers. With a Master-Card, of course, one has available equally lofty services: Master Assist, Master Purchase, Master Travel, Master Rental, Master Legal, and Master Medical. This is the shortest of short lists, yet it makes the point. As word and concept, master has a long and complex history, much of it interwoven with the history of slavery. The least one can say about it at the moment is that Americans are ambivalent about power relations under slavery. They might cheer the underdog in a sports event, but slavery is a different matter altogether.


Such an attitude is the more understandable when one realizes that the black figure most closely associated with slavery and writing about slavery is Booker T. Washington. Up from Slavery has never been out of print, nor has Washington's imprint upon American life. In the late 1970s I did an unsystematic search for towns, schools, and the like named for Washington. I stopped when the list went over 700; meanwhile, I found about fifty namings for Frederick Douglass, thirty for W. E. B. Du Bois, and ten for Malcolm X. Washington's eclipse of Douglass is a prominent feature of the politics of literary history in the 1890s. The expanded edition of the Life and Times of Frederick Douglass (1st ed., 1881) appeared in 1892 and did not do well, selling only 399 copies in two years. Douglass's health was failing, and his death came in February 1895. Washington's Cotton Exposition address followed in seven months and gave him a national platform. Up from Slavery completed the apotheosis in 1901. The final stage came with Washington's recreation of Douglass in his own image in a biography of 1907--a book Washington cajoled and coerced publishers for the exclusive right to do, against Du Bois's superior, competitive claim. For three generations thereafter he would hold the mantle of destiny. Douglass's works all remained out of print until the watershed of 1960, when Benjamin Quarles published his edition of the Narrative for the Harvard University Press. do continue...

The tortuous road to Harper's Ferry:

The tortuous road to Harper's Ferry:
New book looks at four 19th century 'terrorists,' two white, two black
By Ken Gewertz
Gazette Staff


John Stauffer, associate professor of English and American civilization, is the author of 'The Black Hearts of Men: Radical Abolitionists and the Transformation of Race.'

On Oct. 16, 1859, John Brown and 21 men - 16 whites and five blacks - raided the federal arsenal at Harper's Ferry, W.Va., with the intention of distributing arms to Southern slaves and fomenting a violent uprising.

The attack failed. Militiamen surrounded the arsenal and several of Brown's men, including two of his sons, died in the ensuing fight. The next day, U.S. Marines arrived and took Brown and his surviving co-conspirators prisoner. They were later hanged.

Even though Brown's plan misfired, the event shocked the nation because the specter of a slave uprising was precisely what had been haunting slave owners ever since kidnapped Africans started arriving in America to supply forced plantation labor. And hardly anyone, including Northerners, could understand how a white man like Brown could sacrifice his life to liberate blacks. Brown was labeled insane by the press, a characterization that has largely stuck to this day.

But there is more to the story, and more to Brown, than this simplified account would suggest. The charged and complex background to John Brown's raid receives a full elaboration in a new book by John Stauffer, associate professor of English and American Civilization at Harvard.

The book, "The Black Hearts of Men: Radical Abolitionists and the Transformation of Race" (Harvard University Press, 2002), opens a window on the decade before the Civil War and reveals the thoughts, emotions, and relationships of black and white leaders on the leading edge of the abolitionist movement.

Certainly Brown was an extremist who went out in a blaze of glory, but even extremists must plod through a pre-blaze existence, and Brown was no exception. In Stauffer's book, he emerges as a sensitive, morose boy, thrown into deep mourning by the death of a pet squirrel, who became a sternly idealistic patriarch dragging his large family through one business failure after another.

The restless Brown was unable to find peace or contentment until 1848 when he moved to the community of North Elba, N.Y., known by its inhabitants as Timbucto.

Timbucto was the creation of another radical abolitionist, Gerrit Smith. The son of a shrewd Yankee trader who made a fortune in the fur trade and invested his profits in land, Smith rebelled against his father, emulated Lord Byron, and dreamed of becoming a famous poet.

Instead, he found himself an extremely wealthy landowner, inheriting nearly a million acres in New York and Virginia. His wealth allowed him to become one of the 19th century's greatest philanthropists, giving away 120,000 acres of land near Lake Placid to poor blacks, creating the community that came to be known as Timbucto, after the fabled cosmopolitan city in West Africa. He also spent enormous sums to purchase the freedom of Southern slaves and to help support numerous individuals and progressive groups.

Smith's plan for Timbucto was not only to make the recipients of his charity economically self-sufficient, but also to empower them politically by giving them enough land to qualify them to vote.

It was to this community that John Brown came in 1848, promising to help his black neighbors learn to farm and attain self-sufficiency, a promise he largely kept, when he was not off fighting in the guerrilla war to keep Kansas free of slavery. During his years as a resident of Timbucto, he became a close friend of Smith, who helped him plan and finance the attack on Harper's Ferry.

Stauffer's book takes the form of a collective biography, tracing the interrelationships among these two men and two black abolitionist leaders, Frederick Douglass and James McCune Smith.

The charismatic Douglass became the best known of the four by virtue of his speeches, publications, and lifelong efforts to fashion a public persona. Born a slave, he was taught to read by his owner's wife. He escaped to freedom in 1838 and within a few years became famous as an abolitionist speaker, joining William Lloyd Garrison's American Anti-Slavery Society. He wrote voluminously, publishing four different versions of his autobiography. He also edited Frederick Douglass' Paper (funded by Gerrit Smith), a leading abolitionist journal.

James McCune Smith was born in New York City and was freed from slavery as a result of the Emancipation Act of the state of New York. He attended the African Free School, which produced many other prominent black leaders. Denied admission to American medical schools, he traveled to Scotland and received a medical education at the University of Glasgow.

Upon returning to New York, he was lionized by the black community and quickly became a prominent black leader. A successful doctor with an interracial practice, he was also extremely well read in history and literature, and, in his own writings, employed an allusive and nuanced style reminiscent of Herman Melville. He got to know Gerrit Smith when the philanthropist asked him to become one of Timbucto's trustees and to help select worthy black candidates for gifts of land.

Stauffer shows how these four men, two black and two white, learned to trust one another and to work intimately together in an era when most mainstream abolitionists accepted the idea that blacks were inherently inferior. The book's title refers to the idea, common among these radical thinkers, that in order to cure the country's racial ills, whites must change fundamentally and acquire "a black heart."

Unlike mainstream abolitionists, many of whom supported schemes to send the country's black population back to Africa under the assumption that whites could never accept the wholesale emancipation of blacks, these radical activists envisioned a peaceful multiracial society. Gerrit Smith, in fact, created such a society on his extensive land holdings around Peterboro, N.Y.

Unfortunately, the story does not have a happy ending. Inspired by apocalyptic "Bible politics," the four men came increasingly to believe that the "sin" of slavery could be expiated only through the shedding of blood.

They justified violence by asserting that slavery was a crime and its perpetrators criminals. As Douglass wrote, "Men who live by robbing their fellow men of their labor and liberty ... have voluntarily placed themselves beyond the laws of justice and honor, and have become only fitted for companionship with thieves and pirates - the common enemies of God and of all mankind."

From today's perspective, such ideas have the ring of universal truth. But in the antebellum world in which these men were operating, a world in which slavery supported a vast and lucrative plantation economy, their beliefs made them dangerous extremists, not unlike the Muslim suicide bombers and pro-life assassins of today.

After John Brown's raid ended in failure, Gerrit Smith became fearful that his own part in the plan would become public, and he suffered a nervous breakdown. He escaped being indicted as a co-conspirator, but he did spend time in an insane asylum, where he was treated with brandy, marijuana, and opium.

The same authorities that let Smith off the hook went after Douglass with a vengeance, even though the only evidence for his complicity in the raid (he had, in fact, taken part in the planning phase) was one highly ambiguous letter. He was forced to flee to Canada to avoid prosecution. McCune Smith had also been a co-conspirator, but covered his tracks well and was not indicted.

Gerrit Smith eventually recovered his wits, but at the expense of his politics. He renounced the apocalyptic thinking that caused him to believe that Brown's raid would actually succeed and distanced himself from his black friends.

McCune Smith took Gerrit Smith to task for his backsliding and conservatism, scolding him in a series of letters as the Civil War threatened to tear the nation apart. McCune Smith barely survived the end of that conflict, however. He died of heart disease at the age of 52.

Frederick Douglass survived until 1895, becoming the most famous black man in America, but he too gave up his radical politics. He advised Lincoln during the war and became a loyal member of the Republican Party, espousing the idea that racial equality would be achieved through legislation rather than bloodshed.

Such rightward shifts are not unusual in any age, and Stauffer's narrative might be construed as an illustration of the idea that no political movement so radical in its methods and so conspicuously ahead of its time can succeed.

But the story of these four unusual men can also be seen as an example of the ability of human beings to shed their prejudices and work in harmony and trust toward a mutual goal, even if that goal is not to be reached within their lifetimes.

Review of Inhuman Bondage - NYT

'Inhuman Bondage,' by David Brion Davis

Slaves in the Family

Review by IRA BERLIN
Published: May 14, 2006

IT wasn't so long ago that few Americans spoke of slavery, least of all historians. Except at a handful of black colleges, it rarely entered the classroom. History texts gave it scant recognition, other than noting how its presence burdened white Americans. Perhaps the only exception was discussion of the Civil War, but even then slavery made only a brief appearance — since everyone knew the great conflict was about states' rights.

Now slavery is everywhere, with movies like "Amistad," "Glory" and "Beloved," and television documentaries like "Unchained Memories" and "Slavery and the Making of America." Nearly every major museum has mounted an exhibition on slavery, while new museums devoted entirely to the subject are being planned. Bill Clinton and George W. Bush, two presidents representing very different constituencies, have visited the West African slave trading post of Gorée and peered out the "Door of No Return." Congress has mandated that the National Park Service address the question of slavery at all Civil War battlefields, and federal and state courts have adjudicated numerous cases regarding profits extracted from slave labor centuries ago. In today's history books, slavery has become the foundation for our understanding of the past, and almost all universities in the country offer some course on the subject. Books pour from the presses; by one count more than 75 have been published this past year. More are on the way, along with the usual array of CD's and Web sites.

But despite this enormous outflow, controversies continue. For some, slavery is a handy metaphor for exploitation (thus "wage slavery" and the "slavery of sex"). Today's sweatshops, they say, are indistinguishable from yesterday's sugar mills and cotton fields. For others, however, chattel bondage is not just one kind of coercion. Its specific attributes distinguish it from all other forms of oppression, giving it a unique place in human history. And for all Americans, there is the enduring contradiction of their republic as both the beacon of liberty and the world's largest slaveholder.

So the publication of David Brion Davis's "Inhuman Bondage: The Rise and Fall of Slavery in the New World" could not be more welcome. ...continue...