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Title: All Souls' Rising by Madison Smartt Bell ISBN: 0-14-025947-3 Publisher: Penguin Books Pub. Date: 01 November, 1996 Format: Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $15.00 |
Average Customer Rating: 3.65 (17 reviews)
Rating: 5
Summary: The Haitian Slave revolt that casts its shadow over today
Comment: If one wants a powerful and unsettling sense of how the roots of race were buried so deeply in the western hemisphere, and how they entangle so much of the reality of the 20th Centurye, there is no better guide than Madison Smartt Bell. His powerful, blood-seeped, historical novel "All Souls Rising," traces the vibrant African will to freedom as it collides with the arrogant and brutal Colonial settlers of France and the mixed-bloods and others who sought to ride the horse of horrors. Though the land of Bell's imagination is confined mostly to the isolated half of the island known to Columbus as Hispaniola, and to the modern world as Haiti, the reader's imagination will be carried to events as fresh in their humanity as tonight's news reports. Through Bell's brilliantly informed imagination, the souls he births ring all too true-to-life, shudderingly so. Bell's creations will resonate forever in the minds the readers and chillingly so for those who have ever visited Haiti. The awful reality of Bell's world tell us, yes, it must have been that way and it reminds us that there can no other explanation for the world of the races as we know it today
Rating: 3
Summary: Very Good Historical Novel
Comment: This very good book describes the beginning phases of the great Haitian slave revolt. Bell is a talented writer with a real gift for descriptive prose. This long and dense book reads easily and is very informative. Bell depicts a society in which whites, blacks, and mulattoes are locked in a mutual embrace of hatred and exploitation, leading to the horrific events described graphically in this book. This book is not for the squemish, it contains many scenes of horrifying cruelty. This book is very ambitious in scope and has some deficiencies. I find Bell's efforts to emphasize the role of voudon, the syncretic Afro-Haitian religion, somewhat contrived. For a useful comparison, see the brief and evocative novel The Kingdom of this World by the great Cuban novelist Alejo Carpentier. Bell's characters are also somewhat flat. This may be deliberate choice on his part; part of an effort to show the consequences of a society where almost all human relationships are based on asymmetric and exploitative power relationships. Bell does not deal with the role of events in France or how these events shaped what happened in Haiti. This is an understandable but crucial omission. Consequently, we never get a sense of the collision of the ideals of the French Revolution with the reality of colonial exploitation.
Rating: 4
Summary: Ominous, powerful, and exotic
Comment: This story of the Haitian revolution is violent and disturbing, but its violence is handled with care and placed in the context of each character's psychology and motivations. The characters are believable, the history seems painstakingly accurate, and the sensory descriptions are rich and vivid. The book leaves you with new, unresolved questions about what race is -- a topic which obsesses many of the characters in the book as well.
An unforgettable read and an important one.
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Title: Master of the Crossroads by Madison Smartt Bell ISBN: 0142000035 Publisher: Penguin Books Pub. Date: 30 October, 2001 List Price(USD): $15.00 |
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Title: The Black Jacobins: Toussaint L'Ouverture and the San Domingo Revolution by C.L.R. James ISBN: 0679724672 Publisher: Vintage Books USA Pub. Date: 01 October, 1989 List Price(USD): $15.00 |
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Title: The Dew Breaker (Today Show Pick #23) by Edwidge Danticat ISBN: 1400041147 Publisher: Alfred A. Knopf Pub. Date: 01 January, 2004 List Price(USD): $22.00 |
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Title: The Kingdom of This World by Alejo Carpentier, Harriet De Onis ISBN: 0374521972 Publisher: Farrar Straus Giroux Pub. Date: 01 December, 1989 List Price(USD): $12.00 |
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Title: Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History by Michel-Rolph Trouillot ISBN: 0807043117 Publisher: Beacon Press Pub. Date: 01 July, 1997 List Price(USD): $16.00 |
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