French...covers a lot of ground in a book that merges biography with panorama ... Ably treads the line on Nkrumah’s complicated legacy. French keeps reminding the reader of the larger context.
Not a complete biography. Instead, French’s portrait of Nkrumah acts as a hub for elucidating an intellectual history of Pan-Africanism ... Dazzling ... Blending his lucid, reportorial prose with his expertise in African, Black diasporic, and 20th-century political histories, French produces a dynamic, intricate sequence of documentary nonfiction.
This is a sprawling book, and the better for it. Mr. French has delivered a panoramic, sympathetic, yet analytical portrait of a global black movement, deepened by his own family connections with West Africa ... As the fastest-growing part of the world in population, Africa will matter more and more. And Mr. French is an expert guide to its nuances.
Riveting ... Deeply researched and thoughtfully told, incorporating insights from both primary sources and more recent secondary literature. Like many good books, it is also personal ... French’s efforts to understand Nkrumah’s psyche are laudatory, given how little we actually know about the man himself ... French’s book reads as history told in the present tense, at once enthralling and devastating.
Captivating ... Challenges lazy theories that attribute Africa’s current economic precarity and political instability to incompetence ... Although The Second Emancipation aims to be a wide-ranging survey of a singular revolutionary moment, it is most persuasive and propulsive when French homes in on Nkrumah’s almost mythic journey from a village son to a nation’s hope ... French maintains a reverent yet clear-eyed perspective…with an instructive focus on the details of organizing ... French offers a charitable analysis of Nkrumah’s eventual downfall. He doesn’t defend the president’s increasingly authoritarian decision-making, but he does provide a generous amount of context ... What French does well…is remind readers that whatever the struggles faced by individual leaders, credit for African nations’ present-day precarity can only go to plundering empires.
Magisterial ... Weaving a staggering amount of history into a propulsive narrative that recasts the 20th century as a long struggle for liberation, this is a towering achievement.
