12 Years a Slave (commented) in Ultimate Popsugar Reading Challenge

Mar 14, 2016 Stacy rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

There are several books that you read in your life that really change you. This book, for me, is one of those. I believe this book should be read by every high school student in America. What an important and essential book. I can't believe I have never read this book - and if not for the movie, I had never heard of it. I have read so many historical fiction books on slavery, and this is nothing like those. 12 years a Slave is about Solomon Northup - a free man living in New York who is deceived There are several books that you read in your life that really change you. This book, for me, is one of those. I believe this book should be read by every high school student in America. What an important and essential book. I can't believe I have never read this book - and if not for the movie, I had never heard of it. I have read so many historical fiction books on slavery, and this is nothing like those. 12 years a Slave is about Solomon Northup - a free man living in New York who is deceived and kidnapped and sold into slavery. He lives in Louisiana for 12 years and works as a cotton picker, carpenter, and harvests sugar cane. Solomon is intelligent and earnest. He is a brave narrator. I love history and I find the Civil War fascinating. I enjoy reading about the States in the 1800's. I really thought I had some idea as to what life was like back then. Oh, I am so naive. Reading historical historical does not paint the portait that this novel does. We still hear people say that most slave owners were good to their slaves. They took good care of them, they fed them, they clothed them. Many were happy. Solomon's story changes everything. This isn't some fictional story about made-up characters. This is about real people who lived and breathed. Who were beaten and chained and held in bondage with no hope of ever escaping. Eliza was a real woman - whose children were ripped out of her arms on the slave block. Uncle Abram who was so kind and beaten so savagly for no earthly reason. Patsey, who was beaten within inches of her life...whose blood dripped down and fell on the dusty ground and had no more voice to scream. I weeped when I read this book. Huge, breathless, ugly sobs. And what is so amazing to me is that these people are just a handful of the million people who were slaves here in the United States. Thousands of people we will never read about - never know who they were or how they lived or how they felt or survived day-after-day. Its heartbreaking and overwhelming to think about. I am so grateful I read this book. It will be one that stays with me. ...more

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Feb 09, 2016 CrystalIsReading on StoryGraph rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Shelves: history-non-fiction, black, audio, memoir-bio-autobio

This book was mindblowing for me. I'd read a bit about slavery before. Reading one of Frederick Douglass's books this spring was very eye opening. But Solomon Northup's story made the horrors of slavery even more personal. This was a different setting--Louisiana plantations-- and a different background to the slave in question--a man stolen away from house and home and family. It is a horrifying story in almost every way. The stories he tells, about poor Patsy, and old Abram, about the slaves wh This book was mindblowing for me. I'd read a bit about slavery before. Reading one of Frederick Douglass's books this spring was very eye opening. But Solomon Northup's story made the horrors of slavery even more personal. This was a different setting--Louisiana plantations-- and a different background to the slave in question--a man stolen away from house and home and family. It is a horrifying story in almost every way. The stories he tells, about poor Patsy, and old Abram, about the slaves who died while in slavery with him...they were heart-breaking. The vile cruelty of so many of the owners was difficult to comprehend, much less bear to read. How could anyone bear to live through it?? Northup seemed to present a very straight-forward description of the conditions in which he lived, from praise of his first kind master to well-deserved disgust with his final master. From first to last that master proved to be a despicable person. The fact that so many of the worst slave owners claimed to be fellow Christians was all the more sickening for me. That the church of that time and place sanctioned such treatment of fellow humans is even more heart-breaking and shameful.
I said "in almost every way"...there are moments throughout the story that shine out, of self-less kindness and sacrifice. Of joy in small things. Of fascinating glimpses of history and culture, like the native tribe Northup encountered in his first slave home in the great pine woods. There are precious few of those moments, but that makes them shine all the brighter by comparison, I suppose. Even some of the moments of beauty were hauntingly sad, like how Northup's son (view spoiler).
This story, more than anything I've read, haunts me. I saw in the events that happened to "Platt" and the slaves around him, so much of what has contributed to the struggles within African-American communities today. Haunting echoes still reverberate today from this horrible time in our history. Everyone should read this book. Should understand, even a little bit, of what our actual history entailed. Of how human beings were treated. Maybe, just maybe, it would teach us to be kinder to each other, to consider our own attitudes and prejudices about race. About the fallibility of human interpretation of religious truths. About the effects of hundreds of years of inhumane treatment on an entire people. If you haven't read this, read it. Just be ready to have your heart broken over and over again. It's worth it, because it's important. ...more

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