RaveThe Guardian (UK)... a work of historical recovery ... The history examined here has been carefully assembled from shattered fragments; tiny shards of historical detail from which Pennock builds a larger mosaic ... In one of her early chapters Pennock urges us to to “imagine the sixteenth century a little differently”. Despite the enormous challenges presented by the sources and the inevitably fragmentary nature of the lives that appear from within them, few books make as compelling a case for such a reimagining.
Toby Green
RaveNew Statesman (UK)... remarkable ... Not an easy work to categorise, it is at its core an economic history in which the author poses a profoundly challenging question ... Passages from the author’s travels provide observations and anecdotes that usefully link the past to the present day and give voice to the lives and experiences of African themselves. Ranging far beyond economics, Green’s thesis becomes, ultimately, an almost philosophical meditation on the nature of value across differing cultures and societies during a long and under-examined era of early globalisation. What marks the book out as unusual is not the volume of sources but their range. The use of oral histories from an impressive array of African societies is particularly refreshing. In his introduction Green also brilliantly deploys fine art ... Although not always the easiest text to follow—the thematic approach at times obscuring the sense of a developing narrative—this is a stunning work of research and argumentation. It has the potential to become a landmark in our understanding of the most misunderstood of continents.
Ibram X. Kendi
RaveThe Guardian (UK)... brilliant and disturbing ... While Stamped from the Beginning has won Kendi the 2016 National Book award for nonfiction, it has also disturbed some readers. This is because of the author’s fearless reappraisals of the words, actions and philosophies of some of the more revered heroes of American abolitionism and civil rights – including African American heroes ... Kendi’s unusually original and groundbreaking analysis is the product of an almost clinical modus operandi ... The analysis that emerges is delivered largely without sentimentality. This is not a historian fearful of upsetting orthodoxies or questioning fixed reputations ... He goes where the evidence takes him, which is not to where he or we might want it to go ... The methodical nature of Kendi’s approach does not render him blind to historical circumstance nor is he without sympathy for the figures he examines. This is not mechanistic history, but a measured laying out of a compelling, if discomfiting, thesis ... Kendi’s other trick is to cleverly weave into his prose short but nuanced biographies of several legendary American figures...Through their speeches, diaries and letters, Kendi deftly makes the case that racial ideas have always been a functional necessity to a Christian nation that was economically founded upon slavery while being politically and philosophically dedicated to the principles of liberty and freedom ... Kendi is at his most persuasive and powerful when he takes on the most basic assumption that underlies much thinking and writing about race in America – that racial ideas lead to racist policies ... Perhaps what is most disturbing about Kendi’s work is that it shows how the same racial ideas, dressed in different period costumes, have been repeatedly used to explain away the deaths of generations of African Americans, slaves, victims of Jim Crow lynchings and, in the 21st-century, casualties of police shootings.
Andrew Roberts
PositiveThe Guardian[Roberts] has drawn on some fresh material ... The author’s admiration for his subject is clear, but this does not stop him from discussing Churchill’s earlier misjudgments and catastrophic errors ... not an original argument, but Roberts presents it in more detail and with more flair than many previous biographers ... repeatedly in the book the dark episodes of Churchill’s career, often the consequences of his prejudices, are too easily dismissed ... hurchill’s racism and paternalism are treated merely as typical of his era and generation – which they were, but only to some extent ... perhaps no biographer can get beyond the Churchill legend, so long as our devotion to a mythic version of the conflict that defined the man and his century remains so resolute.
Keith Lowe
PositiveThe GuardianIn The Fear and the Freedom, Lowe asks us to question the most critical delusion of all: that the allied powers acted as morally as the circumstances would allow and that this war, more perhaps than any in history, was a 'good war,' fought against an ultimate evil for entirely laudable aims ... With journalistic nous, Lowe has assembled a remarkable chorus of voices and asks the most probing of questions. Their testimony, combined with the author’s pointed analysis, elevates a laudable volume into a very readable and startling book ...not well-rehearsed stories, worn thin by overtelling ... Lowe shows how it was fought across the globe by people of many different races and nationalities ... Yet the testimony in these pages demonstrates that adaptation to the extremes and horrors of war was made possible only by the forging of myth.
