PositiveNew York Times Book ReviewFrench’s design is...to fill an Africa-size hole in conventional accounts of the Age of Discovery and the rise of the West ... French cites compelling research but falls back on his (surely correct) intuition that rival powers would scarcely have spilled so much blood and treasure in their interminable battles to control Black labor if the margins at stake were thin ... Born in Blackness is laced with arresting nuggets ... The evidence that Africans made the New World economically viable is overwhelming, but in his zeal to press his point, French sometimes goes for broke ... Born in Blackness is enlivened with personal anecdotes, but readers looking for a gripping narrative will be disappointed. French repeatedly circles back over his material like a picture restorer revealing a lost world as he calmly insists that we rewrite history. I found the book to be searing, humbling and essential reading.
Laurence Bergreen
MixedThe New York TimesThe Elizabeth-Drake combination is fascinating, but perhaps unavoidably it results in a patchy telling. Events at sea and court unfold separately, with few actual interactions between queen and captain ... There are oddities, too. The Golden Hind was named after the whole of a female red deer, not its rear legs. Galicia is not due south of London. Flurries of repetitions and recapitulations trip up the narrative. After being sent back once more into the thick of an apparently concluded story line, for this reader it felt like déjà vu all over again ... This is a shame, as Drake’s story is both dramatic and timely.
Image by Gerd Altmann from Pixabay[/caption]
