Barracoon: The Story of the Last "Black Cargo" in Book Riot's Read Harder Challenge

Jun 17, 2018 Melissa rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Shelves: to-review, books-i-should-read-again-later

An outstanding small book that finally, deservedly, is available to the wider world. Zora Neale Hurston was a gifted storyteller in her own right, but as an enthnographer possessed the ability to record a subject’s words and manner to let their story come to the front. This is Kossola’s story, preserved in Hurston’s manuscript and kept in good hands at the library at Howard University. Not only is Kossola’s story of being captured and sold into slavery, watching his whole village be obliterated, ...more

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Jan 10, 2019 Rebecca rated it it was amazing

Shelves: audiobook, bookclub-read, 2019-read-harder, conversations-on-race-class

Read Harder 2019: Book by a Woman/AOC that Won a Literary Award in 2018

We read this for our Conversations on Race Sunday School Class, and it also fits this category for Read Harder 2019. I started reading with the physical copy, switched the the audiobook to better grasp the cadence of Kossola/Cudjo's speech (excellently read by Robin Miles), and then finished with the hard copy. When I was listening to the audiobook, I had to keep reminding myself this was nonfiction. It's deeply troubling yet ...more

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Oct 03, 2020 Deedee rated it liked it

Shelves: history-american-1865-1914, african-american, read-2020, read-2020-non-fiction, challenge-2020-fall

The transcripts of Ms. Hurston's interview with Oluale Kossola, also known as Cudjo Lewis, were fascinating, and I'd give that part of the book 5 stars. The transcripts are about half of the book. The rest of the book contains introductions (yes, plural), prefaces, notes, glossary, an afterword, and other various items tangentially related to Africa, the Middle Passage, and life after slavery was abolished. Were those items included to get the page count high enough to justify publication as a b ...more

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Jul 14, 2018 Ana rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Shelves: history, non-fiction, library, social-sciences, memoirs, biographies, women-list, read-harder-challenge-2018

Fantastic account by the last person left alive in 1927 - Cudjo Lewis - that had survived the Transatlantic passage inside a slaver (ship that transported captive Africans to be sold as slaves in the US).

Ms. Hurston - an anthropologist by training and a student of Franz Boas, the father of American anthropology - did an excellent job of letting the subject speak for himself.

There is so much here in this slim little book - the actual account, minus afterword, etc, is only about 110 pages - to fi ...more

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