About this title: In desperate financial straights, a father sells his three children into slavery. Using a range of voices and experimental narrative techniques, Phillips follows the scattered children across continents and through time to wherever their lives lead them: the hold of a slave ship, an African mission, Colorado, and an English village during the war.
Note: This is a general synopsis. Each listing is described below.
Description: Good. Former Library book. Shows some signs of wear, and may have some markings on the inside. Shipped to over one million happy customers. Your purchase benefits world literacy! read more
Description: Very Good. Former Library book. Great condition for a used book! Minimal wear. Shipped to over one million happy customers. Your purchase benefits world literacy! read more
Description: Very Good. Great condition for a used book! Minimal wear. Shipped to over one million happy customers. Your purchase benefits world literacy! read more
Description: Acceptable. Former library book. Shows definite wear, and perhaps considerable marking on inside. Shipped to over 500, 000 happy customers. Your purchase benefits Pennington Public Library! read more
Description: Good. Shows some signs of wear, and may have some markings on the inside. Shipped to over one million happy customers. Your purchase benefits world literacy! read more
Description: Good. Shows some signs of wear, and may have some markings on the inside. Shipped to over one million happy customers. Your purchase benefits world literacy! read more
Edition: 1st
Binding: Cloth
Publisher: Alfred A. Knopf, N. Y.
Date Published: 1993
Description: Cover Art. Very Good in Good jacket. Hard Back. 8vo-over 7¾"-9¾" tall. X-library with normal flaws....The hard cover and the jacket has light shelf wear.....The back of the jacket has a cut where a sticker was removed.......The book may have minor flaws that have went unnoticed.. read more
Edition: 1st American Edition
Binding: Softcover
Publisher: Alfred A. Knopf Incorporated, New York, NY, U.S.A.
Date Published: 1994
ISBN-13:9780679405337ISBN:067940533X
Description: Good. in Fair to Good, mylar wraps. jacket. Ex-Library Mylar DJ is soiled and a bit worn. Caryl Phillips, in 20 years, has the talent to be the next Nobel Prize in Literature winner born in the Caribbean (after Derek Walcott? or V.S. Naipaul? ) read more
"Interestingly weaves the African American Diaspora across time and place. Covering the 18th -20th century, it has an everyman feel to characterize the selling into slavery of Africans and the folks involved. By switching time and place the author asks the reader to interpret the effects of one single act of an ancestor (a man sells his 3 children into slavery because the crops have failed and he cannot feed them) and how that affects generations to come."
"I was luke warm on the book, overall. I really enjoyed the first and third parts, but had a hard time sticking with the second part. It was interesting in concept but somewhat disjointed."
"What a powerful novel! I'd never even heard of this one till it was picked for an online bookgroup I belong to. I couldn't put it down. Really a well conceived and imagined novel. The novel begins with a father explaining how the crops failed and in desperation he sold his three children-Nash, Martha, and Travis-to a slave trader. The four sections that make up the center of the novel focus on each of the children as well as one a young ship's captain on his first trip to bring slaves from Africa to America-the one who picks up the "2 strong man-boys and a proud girl" from their father. The focus of each section and its language is completely different and appropriate to the content. There is tragedy but also triumph in each life. Nash is conceived as an educated American Negro whose master sent him back to Africa in the 1820s-to the new nation of Liberia-to educate his people and to teach them Christianity. We read his letters to the master, increasingly despairing because he doesn't hear back (his master's wife has intercepted and destroyed the letters). Martha is a slave, sold away from her husband and daughter when the master of a Virginia plantation dies, who goes first to pre-Civil War Kansas which is not a slave state and then, when her owner intends selling her across the river (into Missouri which is a slave state) she runs away and joins a wagon train of free blacks going to California, but dies on the way, in Colorado. Travis is an American GI in WWII, stationed in England who carries on a delicate courtship with an Englishwoman, fathers a child, comes back to marry her, and then is killed on the beach in Italy. Nash's and Martha's voices are appropriate to their time and place; their thoughts are on freedom and on love. Travis is seen through the eyes of June who loves him though she's never really known love before. There's also a section focused on the captain of the American slave ship-consisting of excerpts from a ship's log and letters to his wife. Phillips doesn't handle each section the same way, nor are the voices exclusively those of the African disapora. Captain Hamilton's view point is important because he's not a hardened slave trader, though possibly his father, who captained the ship before him, was. But making the last section from Joyce's point of view was brilliant. Had he made it from Travis's, we might have gone over territory that had already been covered, but that of the woman who loved him brought something new. I loved how Phillips tied it up at the end, in the voice of the distraught father who sold his children, quoting from each of the voices and relating their stories to black soldiers in Vietnam who "had no quarrel with the VietCong", to Toussaint L'Overature, to those struggling with Papa Doc and other dictators, to Jazz and dance and James Baldwin (who in Paris wrote Nobody Knows My Name) and Martin Luther King's "I have a dream" speech."
"I really didn't enjoy this book. I just needed something to read on the plane to Minnesota. There were a few different vignettes in the book, each describing one or more aspects of slavery. I think I would have enjoyed the story if each of the books had been intertwined with each other. But each story seemed to stand alone without much reference to the next. So there really was no story, per say. I was an empty read and without emotion."
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