Hybrid Book Review - The London Telegraph

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Ordinarily, we include in each month’s Reference Materials section, book reviews (if they exist) from the NY Times and Washington Post -- and the British press for books with international implications and The Wall Street Journal for books with financial implications.

This situation is unique because the autobiography is 160 years old and, although it was the centerpiece of the Abolitionist Movement for the 7 years leading to the American Civil War, it had fallen into obscurity for more than a century until it became the focus of the movie which won the 2014 Golden Globe for Best Picture and has been nominated for 9 Academy Awards including Best Picture.

There do not appear to any book reviews from 160 years ago.

Posted in this section are 4 hybrid reviews -- hybrid in the sense that they focus on the book as well as the movie. In order of relative focus on the book (vs. the movie), they are from:

The London Guardian
The London Telegraph
The London Mail
The New Yorker

Please also see the Original Proposal section above for: (1) a PBS Newshour interview of John Ridley, the author of the movie’s screenplay, and (2) an excerpt from a Wikipedia article summarizing the reaction of movie critics.
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johnkarls
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Hybrid Book Review - The London Telegraph

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The London Telegraph – 1/26/2014

12 Years a Slave: why the book is even better
By Serena Davies who finds Steve McQueen's screen adaptation a horrifically powerful piece of filmmaking but believes he could have made it richer still

When I saw the film of 12 Years a Slave at a screening a few weeks ago, I was so horrified that I read the book afterwards to find out if the events it depicts really happened.

The book is the memoir of Solomon Northup, a free black man kidnapped and sold into slavery in mid-19th-century America. Although it is that holy grail for historians, a written record from a member of a society that was otherwise incapable of written records (barely any slaves were educated), I assumed it would be hampered by its time, insurmountably awkward in style and bogged down in dull detail. But although there are clunky phrases, its compelling credibility means you scarcely notice.

More importantly, it is better than the film – not as a piece of art but as a work of human insight. The film, out in cinemas since Friday and banking five-star reviews and awards at every turn, is a polemic. It is a finely acted, beautifully framed, one-note testament to the degradation of slavery.

Its horrors are not exaggerated: the book contains worse still. But British director Steve McQueen made two key choices in how he deviated from the book, which I think denied his piece nuance and chiaroscuro, and dodged any final attempt to examine the ineffableness of what it is to be a human being that would have made the film profound.

Most of the slave owners, in both book and film, are perfectly poisonous. But one, Master Ford, is actually decent in the book. McQueen makes him less so in the film - more morally compromised - and thus avoids the knotty but important opportunity to investigate that ethically perplexing thing: an otherwise good man who thinks it right to keep slaves. Aristotle also kept slaves, but it isn’t a simple thing to damn him.

But the bigger loss is McQueen’s choice to show no capacity for joy in the slaves’ hearts – something that Northup records did remarkably exist.

There is the case of Patsey, a slave girl who is morose throughout the film, due to the terrible way she is treated. In the book she starts off gutsy and humorous, despite her rotten life, and it is the fact that her master crushes that personality out of her, as well as lacerating her flesh, that makes her tragedy twice as heartbreaking on the page as it is on screen.

And the most memorable passage in the book was for me Northup’s description of Christmas. Slaves worked all day every day throughout the year, except at Christmas, when they got a few days off. Then a plantation would take its turn to host the slaves’ Christmas party. Yards of trestle tables would be set out, upon which proper food was heaped, instead of the maggot-infested bacon and corn that the slaves had to live off the rest of the time.

They would feast for hours and then, to the tunes of battered instruments, they’d dance until dawn. How on earth could they dance all night when they’d been worked beyond endurance the previous 12 months?

It was the most incredible thing in the whole story. A testament to the glory of the human spirit in triumph over the worst of human abuse. But McQueen left it out.

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