Powerful collection that complicates the arc of history
5 stars
This is a collection of 80 short essays each by a different writer, each anchored to a consecutive 5-year span, starting with the first documented landing of enslaved Africans in the North American colonies.
The range of voices is a huge strength, with each writer not only having a different style but getting to make dramatically different choices in where to focus attention. Individually, many of the essays filled in gaps in my knowledge, but the whole is much more than the sum of those parts. It helps the book really live up to its "community history" billing - while of course even 80 authors can't speak for a whole community of millions, they can get a lot closer to that than any one alone could.
As should be expected given the subject matter, many of the pieces are very heavy and grim. Certainly some of the things I learned …
This is a collection of 80 short essays each by a different writer, each anchored to a consecutive 5-year span, starting with the first documented landing of enslaved Africans in the North American colonies.
The range of voices is a huge strength, with each writer not only having a different style but getting to make dramatically different choices in where to focus attention. Individually, many of the essays filled in gaps in my knowledge, but the whole is much more than the sum of those parts. It helps the book really live up to its "community history" billing - while of course even 80 authors can't speak for a whole community of millions, they can get a lot closer to that than any one alone could.
As should be expected given the subject matter, many of the pieces are very heavy and grim. Certainly some of the things I learned from reading it are further, deeper depravities than I'd already known of how white people dehumanised those they had enslaved. But there are also flashes of brilliance.
I never read more than one chapter in a day, to really let things sink in. That it took me so much longer than 80 days does reflect the heaviness: this is not a book to escape into after a hard day. But it's thoroughly worth the effort.
