Slave

Book Description

A shocking true story of contemporary slavery: a young girl, snatched from her tribal village in Africa, survives enslavement in Sudan and London before making a courageous escape to freedom.

Mende Nazer lost her childhood at age twelve, when she was sold into slavery. It all began one horrific night in 1993, when Arab raiders swept through her Nuba village, murdering the adults and rounding up thirty-one children, including Mende. .

Mende was sold to a wealthy Arab family who lived in Sudan's capital city, Khartoum. So began her dark years of enslavement. Her Arab owners called her "Yebit," or "black slave." She called them "master." She was subjected to appalling physical, sexual, and mental abuse. She slept in a shed and ate the family leftovers like a dog. She had no rights, no freedom, and no life of her own.

Normally, Mende's story never would have come to light. But seven years after she was seized and sold into slavery, she was sent to work for another master--a diplomat working in the United Kingdom. In London, she managed to make contact with other Sudanese, who took pity on her. In September 2000, she made a dramatic break for freedom.

Slave is a story almost beyond belief. It depicts the strength and dignity of the Nuba tribe. It recounts the savage way in which the Nuba and their ancient culture are being destroyed by a secret modern-day trade in slaves. Most of all, it is a remarkable testimony to one young woman's unbreakable spirit and tremendous courage.

Customer Reviews:

Sad but excellent story of courage and the will to survive!.......2007-09-27

Mende's story is told in such a simple way. It's as though her emotional growth was put on pause at age 12 - in that she remains very child-like in her response to what's going on around her. Maybe this is what kept her from truly being consumed by hatred toward those who took the most precious thing from her - her family.

It's an excellent read and I'd definitely recommend it. What struck me most was Mende's comments about how she was a good Muslim and did not understand how other's who were supposed to be of her same faith treated her as or worse than the animals they kept as pets!

I think that it was her loving family and tribal life that probably played a great role in giving her the courage to continue on and finally seek means to escape - even though she often writes of her fears. This emotional armor kept her strong and proved to be a real life-line for her when things were the worst.

Difficult Subject - A call to action.......2007-07-23

This is a tough book but one that you must read.

Mende grew up in the Nuba Mountains in Sudan. Her family and her tribe are black Africans who lived in peace until the government of Sudan (Arabs in contrast) raided her village and disrupted their peaceful and simple existence. While both followers of Islam, the Nuba were viewed as inferior due to their race and Mende was taken from her family and enslaved. She was stripped of her identity as a Nuba, forced to forgo her faith (one that she shared with those enslaving her), and treated as disposable.

Her story is remarkable in that she survived. Many of her friends taken captive with her did not. This is an unremarkable story in that there are an estimated 27 million slaves worldwide.

My suggestion: read this book and then find some way to help the 27 million Mende's of the world that are relying on you to put an end to slavery for good.

The Nasty Truth Revealed!!! .......2007-06-14

Anyone that desires to get to the crux of the Sudanese abuses needs to look no further. This is a brilliant first-hand account of attrocities committed by the Sudanese government with active colaboration between the Sudanese army and the Janjaweed militia.

The only difference from the harsh realities laid out by this awesome work is that in the recent past, the Sudanese government has become more desperate since they discovered oil in the Western & Southern parts of the country. This has led to even further abuse, and so for anybody that thinks what happened in this book is bad, just imagine it 2 or 3 fold worse than it was in the period the book relates to.

Sudanese and other Arab societies have (prior to the western-world's involvement) and still actively engage in slavery as described in this book.

It's high time the world took a stand against such flagrant abuse of human rights in a more comprehensive & robust way. Mende is one of the lucky few who ever escape the cycle & she needs to be made the face and encouraged to give public talks & presentations in the fight against this canker of society.

Narrative Comes Alive.......2007-06-11

I found this writing something of a watershed for the purpose of capturing the psychological mechanisms and cultural place of slavery from the first person. It will be my primary frame of reference. Although the account of Mende Nazer's specific case, the sole subject of this book, was never corroborated by the text of the British Home Office determinations of 2002 and later, it none the less credibly brings life to, and brings fairly detailed mechanical observation of what a slave experiences within Arab culture. (In light of the Darfur situation, the prevalence of this latter phenomenon is not credibly disputed.) If you want to gain an internalized feeling for what a young African slave feels, thinks, and survives, as well to fathom what a slaveholder might think, feel, and do to establish pyschological influence over a slave within the cultural context of this book, well, this is the book to buy. (Steve Hassan's books on overcoming cult mind control, for me, make a very illuminating complement to this story.) It does as well expose a fundamental juxtaposition between vices within Arab culture and that culture's inextricable centrality to the Islamic religion (a faith with which Arab culture is portrayed to be in conflict in this book).

Slave.......2007-05-19

This is a very easy read. The author did a great job of painting a picture of what she went through. I have been to Sudan twice so it was a great way for me to get a closer look at what these people have been through. I enjoyed it when she gave us the arabic words for certain things. I commend Mende for being able to move forward with a successful life.

Squeaking Cleopatras: The Elizabethan Boy Player

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Wishful Guess Work

Squeaking Cleopatras: The Elizabethan Boy Player
Joy Leslie Gibson
Manufacturer: Sutton Publishing
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover

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ASIN: 0750924888

Book Description

This intriguing and controversial book is the first to examine women's roles in the plays of Shakespeare and his fellow dramatists from the perspective of the boy actors who played these multi-faceted parts.

Customer Reviews:

Wishful Guess Work.......2002-05-19

Joy Leslie Gibson's handsome book is a strange mixture of useful fact and wishful guess work. Her early chapters are terrific - she summarises in an accesable and interesting way the work of early scholars and extends it by examining the sumptuary laws and dress standards of Elizabethan England.

I feel she is on less steady earth when applying her assertion that the breathing patterns of Shakespeare's major speeches for women were written with boy actors in mind. As a foundation she asks the reader to accept that all punctuation in the plays is unrepresentative of the authors intentions - including the 1623 First Folio (ignoring the fact that the two editors were actors who had worked with the author since 1593!) and then arbitairily replaces it with an assumption that the thought patterns of the speeches can be understood without them and breath points established. Essentially she removes one set of punctuation that does not fit her thesis and replaces it with one that does - of her own making.

She also makes some doubtful assertions about the women's roles always being shorter than their male counterparts, ignoring roles of such depth, range AND length as Juliet and Rosalind.

Book Description

Charles Dickens (1812-1870) has produced some of the most memorable writings in the English language, including such well known works as "A Christmas Carol, Sketches by Boz, A Tale of Two Cities, Oliver Twist, Daivid Copperfield, Great Expectations, and The Pickwick Papers."

Dickens is famous for the characters he created and his descriptions. A man of tremendous energy, he spent hours a day walking the London streets from which his characters and scenes came.

Most of Dickens' work was in magazine serial form. Quiet Vision publishes not only Dickens' well known works but also many of his lesser known but still well crafted works.

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It is supposed that the Phoenicians, who were an ancient people, famous for carrying on trade, came in ships to these Islands, and found that they produced tin and lead; both very useful things, as you know, and both produced to this very hour upon the sea-coast. The most celebrated tin mines in Cornwall are, still, close to the sea.

Customer Reviews:

dickens on england.......2006-03-22

This book is a delightful history of England. It is a book for all ages. As an adult I have enjoyed reading the book for pure pleasure. My two teenage daughters have used this book numerous times for school projects, especially for their history and compostion classes.

Children of the Queen's Revels: A Jacobean Theatre Repertory

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Children of the Queen's Revels: A Jacobean Theatre Repertory
Lucy Munro
Manufacturer: Cambridge University Press
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover

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ASIN: 0521843561

Book Description

Between 1603 and 1613, The Queen's Revels staged plays by Francis Beaumont, George Chapman, John Fletcher, Ben Jonson, John Marston and Thomas Middleton, all of whom were at their most innovative when writing for this company. Combining theatre history and critical analysis, this study provides a history of the children's company, and an account of their repertory. It demonstrates the involvement in dramatic production of dramatists, shareholders, patrons, audiences and actors alike, and reappraises issues such as management, performance style and audience composition.

Motherhood and Mothering in Anglo-Saxon England (The New Middle Ages)

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Motherhood and Mothering in Anglo-Saxon England (The New Middle Ages)
Mary Dockray-Miller
Manufacturer: Palgrave Macmillan
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover

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ASIN: 0312227213

Book Description

Motherhood and Mothering in Anglo-Saxon England sifts through the historical evidence to describe and analyze a world of violence and intrigue, where mothers needed to devise their own systems to protect, nurture, and teach their children. Mary Dockray-Miller casts a maternal eye on Bede, the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, and Beowulf to reveal mothers who created rituals, genealogies, and institutions for their children and themselves. Little-known historical figures--queens, abbesses, and other noblewomen--used their power in court and convent to provide education, medical care, and safety for their children, showing us that mothers of a thousand years ago and mothers of today had many of the same goals and aspirations.

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Mary Dockray-Miller casts a maternal eye on Bede, the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, and Beowulf to reveal mothers who created rituals, genealogies, and institutions for their children and themselves.

Book Description

When Barbara Hanawalt's acclaimed history The Ties That Bound first appeared, it was hailed for its unprecedented research and vivid re-creation of medieval life. David Levine, writing in The New York Times Book Review, called Hanawalt's book "as stimulating for the questions it asks as for the answers it provides" and he concluded that "one comes away from this stimulating book with the same sense of wonder that Thomas Hardy's Angel Clare felt [:] 'The impressionable peasant leads a larger, fuller, more dramatic life than the pachydermatous king.'" Now, in Growing Up in Medieval London, Hanawalt again reveals the larger, fuller, more dramatic life of the common people, in this instance, the lives of children in London. Bringing together a wealth of evidence drawn from court records, literary sources, and books of advice, Hanawalt weaves a rich tapestry of the life of London youth during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. Much of what she finds is eye opening. She shows for instance that--contrary to the belief of some historians--medieval adults did recognize and pay close attention to the various stages of childhood and adolescence. For instance, manuals on childrearing, such as "Rhodes's Book of Nurture" or "Seager's School of Virtue," clearly reflect the value parents placed in laying the proper groundwork for a child's future. Likewise, wardship cases reveal that in fact London laws granted orphans greater protection than do our own courts. Hanawalt also breaks ground with her innovative narrative style. To bring medieval childhood to life, she creates composite profiles, based on the experiences of real children, which provide a more vivid portrait than otherwise possible of the trials and tribulations of medieval youths at work and at play. We discover through these portraits that the road to adulthood was fraught with danger. We meet Alison the Bastard Heiress, whose guardians married her off to their apprentice in order to gain control of her inheritance. We learn how Joan Rawlyns of Aldenham thwarted an attempt to sell her into prostitution. And we hear the unfortunate story of William Raynold and Thomas Appleford, two mercer's apprentices who found themselves forgotten by their senile master, and abused by his wife. These composite portraits, and many more, enrich our understanding of the many stages of life in the Middle Ages. Written by a leading historian of the Middle Ages, these pages evoke the color and drama of medieval life. Ranging from birth and baptism, to apprenticeship and adulthood, here is a myth-shattering, innovative work that illuminates the nature of childhood in the Middle Ages.

Customer Reviews:

Dry, lifeless.......2004-03-28

Growing Up in Medieval London: The Experience of Childhood in History by Barbara A. Hanawalt. Not recommended.

University of Minnesota history professor Barbara Hanawalt uses an array of primary sources, from court cases and Hustings Wills to contemporary books of advice, to show how typical children grew up in London during the 14th and 15th centuries, from an abbreviated childhood to early marriages and lengthy apprenticeships. Between chapters full of facts taken from her sources, she interjects composite fictions, from a schoolboy's drowning to a case of marriage-related blackmail.

Hanawalt covers such topics as living conditions, sanitation, family and social networks, apprentice and servant contracts, relationships between apprentices and masters and servants and masters, orphans, wards, marriage, and birth. She also tries to define how an individual moved from one stage of life to another, with an apprentice or servant contract marking the transition from childhood to adolescence and the end of apprentice or a marriage marking the end of adolescence.

Although Hanawalt provides an excellent overview of how young people moved through life and the different expectations of males and females, there is little life in these pages beyond the facts, despite the fictional interjections (one of which turns the mythical "Robin Hood" into an urban blackmailer!). One comes away with a sense of a very ordered society, where citizens' orphans are under the protection of the city through the mayor and chancellor and the guilds regulate dress, behaviour, and other potential expressions of individuality. There is little detail, here, however, beyond the bare facts to show how children spent their days, how they felt about their parents and society, and what they aspired to. There is more about the contractual nature of apprenticeship and servanthood than about the day-to-day life of an apprentice, leaving the reader feeling that there are critical pieces missing about what "growing up" meant to the medieval mind. In many cases, Hanawalt will draw broad conclusions about how a particular situation might be treated based on only one or two records, although they may not be representative.

Hanawalt occasionally makes odd or even ludicrous statements or comments. For example, she says, "Ratus ratus, a scientific name with a redundant ring" unnecessarily, as this adds nothing of interest. Not only that, but the scientific name is Rattus rattus, and, although Hanawalt calls it the "common house rat," it's more typically known as the black rat. On p. 42, she says, "Growing up in fourteenth- and fifteenth-century London could not have been the same experience as growing up in more modern London." This statement is so laughably self-evident even to a non-historian, non-Londoner such as myself that one wonders what Hanawalt was thinking to include it. Later, she talks about "pox, sweating sickness, flux . . ." without defining what was meant by those terms. (Is "sweating sickness" a generic term for unspecified fevers, is it a specific fever, or is it something entirely different?) She asserts that "females have a biological advantage in surviving disease" but does not provide the basis for this claim or cite a source for it. (I am curious as to what this advantage is.)

Some of Hanawalt's examples do not seem related to the point. She says that "a visit to a physician might have been more of a hazard than a help," then cites a case where "the child was not cured." Logically, the supporting example should have illustrated how a physician's treatment actually harmed the patient. She notes that "prostitutes, female servants, and singlewomen were at risk for conceiving illegitimate children." What is a "singlewoman"? Perhaps this term has a specific medieval meaning, but without a definition, it sounds like she is saying unmarried women were at risk of having illegitimate children. At one point, she notes that "cases of forced prostitution of vulnerable young teenage girls can be multiplied in the record sources, but the repetition of such sad cases become depressing." Does the reader need to be told this? And, since Hanawalt declares in the introduction that she has "a basic optimism about human nature that comes through," her viewpoint is admittedly skewed.

Undoubtedly, Hanawalt has done her research and made a contribution to our understanding of the workings of London law and society as they affected children and adolescents (however defined). Unfortunately, for the general reader looking for the Middle Ages to come to life, this is not the best place to go.

Diane L. Schirf, 20 March 2004.

Fascinating.......2002-01-23

I found this book by accident in my local bookstore as I was trying to find something on the history of childhood diseases. I am not a professional historian. Nevertheless, although it may sound silly, I literally couldn't put this book down. I read it at one sitting. So few history books give a true picture of what life was like in some earlier era and this book is really illuminating, covering a wide variety of topics, from birth to late adolescence. Because the historical record is a little thin as regards children's experience, the author in some cases must speculate, but always does so reasonably and with support from the data obtained from court proceedings and other sources. I enjoyed the book so much I considered writing the author a personal thank-you letter!

Vivid and carefully researched.......2000-03-04

Growing Up in Medieval London is not only an informative book, but interesting to read. By examining documents which still exist -- medieval court cases, censuses, parish registers, and tax listings -- Barbara Hanawalt reconstructs the lives of children and teenagers in medieval London. She dispels commonly held myths about this period of history -- for example, that medieval people did not recognise childhood as a distinct life stage, or that because of high child mortality they did not become psychologically attached to their offspring. The archival materials that Hanawalt presents tell a different story. Medieval Londoners were careful to protect the well-being of young orphans, and although corporal punishment of children, apprentices and students was tolerated to a degree we would find unacceptable today, cases of physical or sexual abuse were punished by the courts. Children in medieval London were less prone to accidental deaths, as demonstrated by the coroners' records, than children in villages, perhaps because in the close communities in which they were raised neighbours kept a closer watch on children playing in the vicinities of their homes.

Hanawalt addresses the material environment in which young Londoners grew up, and explores the differing experiences of orphans and wards of the court, well-to-do heirs and heiresses, bastards, schoolboys, apprentices and servants. Girls' upbringing and opportunities were not the same as boys, and fewer documents exist to record their lives, but Hanawalt draws attention to those records that can illuminate their experience. This is an innovative, fascinating book for anyone with an interest in the Middle Ages.

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Lively, touching, informative and a delight to read

Autobiography: a warm family story and riveting read!

London Child of the 1870's (Oxford Paperbacks)
M. Vivian Hughes
Manufacturer: Oxford Univ Pr
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover

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ASIN: 0192812165

Customer Reviews:

Lively, touching, informative and a delight to read.......2005-09-05

Mary Hughes was born Mary Vivian Thomas in October 1866, and in 1870 she and her parents and four older brothers moved to a house in Canonbury, north London, where they lived for nine years. They were a moderately well-off family; they did not feel themselves rich, though they had a couple of servants.

Hughes tells the story of those years with wit and interest. She's a great story-teller, and has a naturally cheerful outlook; coupled with happy memories that would have been enough to make this an entertaining book. But she is also sharp and insightful, and has strong powers of observation. The result is a fascinating view of a child's life one hundred and thirty years ago. I love history for all sorts of reasons, but I got more pleasure from this book (and its sequels) than from many history texts I've read, because at the end of it I felt I not only knew and liked Mary Thomas, but I knew what it felt like to be a child in Victorian London.

Hughes talks about every little detail: wooden playing blocks, window-shopping, walking in the neighbourhood, visiting cousins in Cornwall, learning Latin at home, favourite books, religious aunts, children's games, and much more. It's an enchanting read.

The book is also strong in feeling. There are tragic deaths in the book, and I found these more affecting than any fiction, feeling as I did that the family were now friends of mine.

Highly recommended.

Autobiography: a warm family story and riveting read!.......1999-05-05

An autobiography of Molly Hughes who grows up in 1870s north London. Family life and early schooldays. Lots of period detail about London life and a fascinating read. The first of a series (later books deal with her education at North London Collegiate School, her training as a teacher in the very early days of teacher training colleges, her marriage, and her work as an inspector of schools. The books were first published by Oxford University Press in the 1930s and 40s, appearing as very popular OUP paperbacks in the 1980s. The paperbacks frequently appear in the secondhand market. Highly recommended.

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A child's History of England
Charles Dickens
Manufacturer: AST
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover

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ASIN: 517015075X

The Health of the Schoolchild: A History of the School Medical Service in England and Wales

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The Health of the Schoolchild: A History of the School Medical Service in England and Wales
Bernard Harris
Manufacturer: Open University Press
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover

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ASIN: 0335099955

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Cry Softly!: The Story of Child Abuse
Margaret O. Hyde
Manufacturer: Westminster John Knox Pr
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover

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ASIN: 0664327230

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