The Atlantic Sound (Vintage International) - Softcover

Phillips, Caryl

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0375701036 ISBN 13: 9780375701030

Publisher: Knopf Publishing Group, 2001

Synopsis

In this fascinating inquiry into the African Diaspora, Caryl Phillips embarks on a soul-wrenching journey to the three major ports of the transatlantic slave trade.

Juxtaposing stories of the past with his own present-day experiences, Phillips combines his remarkable skills as a travel essayist with an astute understanding of history. From an West African businessman's interactions with white Methodists in nineteenth-century Liverpool to an eighteenth-century African minister's complicity in the selling of slaves to a fearless white judge's crusade for racial justice in 1940s Charleston, South Carolina, Phillips reveals the global the impact of being uprooted from one's home through resonant, powerful narratives.

About this title

Review

Caryl Phillips has established himself as one of the supreme chroniclers of African dispossession and exile. In previous works such as The European Tribe and Crossing the River, he documents the ironies of post-colonial history. Phillips' latest book is the kind that is best described as a "meditation", although it is also a fine and invigorating travel book. The subject of Phillips's broodings is that of displacement, diaspora, homelessness--all those things that ineluctably accompany any descendant of West African slaves. Phillips himself was born in St Kitts, West Indies in 1958, and so here he re-traces the first transatlantic journey he made with his mother in the late 1950s, by banana boat from the Caribbean to the grey shores of the Mother Country. He visits three cities central to the slave trade: Liverpool, Elmina in Ghana, and Charleston. Finally in Israel, he finds a community of 2,000 African-Americans who have lived in the Negev desert for 30 years. Wholly absorbing, always surprising, brilliantly observant, sensitive to human tragedy but never pessimistic, Phillips writes as beautifully as ever. "It is futile to walk into the face of history. As futile as trying to keep the dust from one's eyes in the desert."--Christopher Hart

Review

"A lyrical survey that...elicit[s] and illuminat[es] the patterns and prejudices of race."
--The New York Times Book Review

"Impressive, poignant.... A travel book crafted with the touch of a skilled novelist."
--Time Out New York

"A trenchant...book that sounds the depth of slavery's legacy."
--San Francisco Sunday Examiner & Chronicle

About this edition

• Publisher: Knopf Publishing Group
• Publication date: 2001
• ISBN 10: 0375701036
• ISBN 13: 9780375701030
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 288