Powerful ... Kara provides a microhistory of the ship and its most fateful voyage, narrating in gripping detail every stage of its violent and historic trans-Atlantic journey ... Kara has done impressive research in the archives of the Royal African Company ... Wrenchingly vivid ... The book is in the end a model of sophisticated research, lucid writing and engaged conscience ... The connections are real but the conception of causation is too narrow .… The limited conception of causation, from great man to great man, also obscures the massive resistance of enslaved people themselves against the institution of slavery and reduces most of them to suffering victims ... The Zorg remains a book of great importance and one that will likely become a classic .… Even if the Zorg and the ensuing debate were not quite what the author makes them out to be, they will always be a potent exposé of the ancient clash between humanity and property.
Wrenching, superb ... Kara recreates these scenes with grisly precision ... The Zorg shines brightest when it shifts back to Britain and the massacre’s aftermath, the finger-pointing that eventually shattered the shackles of bondage across an empire ... Kara blends Grisham-esque thriller elements with the propulsive quality of David Grann’s The Wager and Sophie Elmhirst’s A Marriage at Sea as a writer he’s every bit their equal ... An epic in miniature, The Zorg is one of this year’s superlative nonfiction books.
A vast amount of research has gone into the book ... Kara has even convincingly identified the writer of the crucial anonymous letter ... Unfortunately, it is clumsily constructed and badly written ... But Kara’s is only partially a maritime story and he really doesn’t know the ropes, literally ... This matters because Kara tries to dramatise his history (à la Grann), but his errors make it difficult to have faith in the veracity of his colour ... This is a shameful, terrible story. It’s a pity that The Zorg falls so short of telling it properly.
