![]() ![]() ![]() It's been nearly 30 years since William McFeely's epic biography of Frederick Douglass, and as historian David Blight notes with depressing accuracy in his magisterial new book Frederick Douglass, Prophet of Freedom (beautifully produced by Simon & Schuster), “The problem of the twenty-first century is still some agonizingly enduring combination of the legacies bleeding from slavery and color lines.” Relevance is a wobbly leg on which to rest the weight of a biography, particularly a 900-page doorstop, and Blight, a Yale University professor, winner of the Bancroft Prize, and editor of annotated editions of Douglass's first two autobiographies, wisely here crafts a monument to the man his his own time rather than in the lens of our own. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |