Volume 24, Number 21 & 22 · January 26, 1978
A History of Endurance
By Willie Lee Rose
Black Odyssey: The Afro-American Ordeal in Slavery
by Nathan Irvin Huggins
Pantheon, 250 pp., $8.95
Saying what Nathan Huggins's new book on the Afro-American experience is not may help to define what it is. It is not sociology, psychology, or anthropology, though there are significant insights gleaned from these disciplines, and large sections of the book read much like the more successful popular works in those fields. Black Odyssey is not a novel nor is it poetry, but the passion of its language suggests the freedom and personal involvement of those arts. Black Odyssey, by a black historian who teaches at Columbia, is a history of the enslavement of Africans and their experience as slaves in America, but it definitely reflects a new approach to the subject. What is one to make of a work of history without footnotes, with no direct quotations, few specific names of individuals, and fewer dates and specific deeds? What is one to make of a work on American slavery under 250 pages?
Review, 2107 words
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