ENTERTAINMENT
May 27, 2012 | By Philip Brandes
“What good is freedom if you can't do nothing with it?” demands the superb Anthony J. Haney as former Underground Railroad conductor Solly Two Kings in an early defining moment of Rubicon Theatre's solid and at times soul-stirring revival of August Wilson's “Gem of the Ocean.” No dramatist has explored the burdens of freedom in greater depth than Wilson, whose epic 10-play “Pittsburgh Cycle” portraying the struggles and unfulfilled dreams...
ENTERTAINMENT
February 5, 2012 | By Richard Rayner, Special to the Los Angeles Times
The Quality of Mercy A Novel Barry Unsworth Nan A. Talese/Doubleday: 336 pp., $26.95 "Sacred Hunger," which won a half-share in the 1992 Man Booker Prize for Barry Unsworth (the co-winner was Michael Ondaatje's "The English Patient"), tracks the adventures of the crew of the slave ship the Liverpool Merchant, that mutinies and establishes an egalitarian community in the Florida swamps. The novel is a parable about the capitalist impulse, about man's lust for "profit, which justifies everything, sanctifies any purposes.
ENTERTAINMENT
April 25, 2008 | Charles McNulty, Times Theater Critic
History pays a mind-blowing visit in Daniel Beaty's heartfelt and generally winning solo show "Emergency," which opened Wednesday at the Geffen Playhouse. In the waters of New York Harbor, a stone's throw from the ever-fabulous Lady Liberty, a 400-year-old slave ship surfaces to the amazement of a growing throng of African Americans. Though we never actually see the physical vessel onstage, the crowds of sightseers and tourist merchants hawking "slave ship buttons" assure us that this is no floating phantom.
ENTERTAINMENT
January 2, 2008 | Tim Rutten, Times Staff Writer
Abraham Lincoln famously remarked, "As I would not be a slave, so I would not be a master." In the many years since, something of the Emancipator's moral point has been lost, along with the memory of what benefiting from slavery entailed. No one who reads Marcus Rediker's searingly brilliant "The Slave Ship: A Human History" can have the slightest doubt concerning the real point of Lincoln's aphorism.
OPINION
December 9, 2006 | Adam Hochschild, ADAM HOCHSCHILD is the author, most recently, of "Bury the Chains: Prophets and Rebels in the Fight to Free an Empire's Slaves," about the British antislavery movement.
LAST WEEK, Prime Minister Tony Blair made an apology that was unusual in both subject and form. Writing in the New Nation, a newspaper for his country's black population, he spoke of his "deep sorrow" for Britain's role in the slave trade and slavery. The occasion for this statement -- and for much more official speechmaking to come -- is the approaching bicentennial of the end of the British slave trade.
ENTERTAINMENT
September 19, 2005 | From Associated Press
Olaudah Equiano wrote with vivid detail of life as human cargo -- the foul smells aboard the slave ship that brought him from West Africa to the New World in the 18th century, the anguished cries of women, the despair of those headed to a life of bondage. The bestselling autobiography he later published is now a key text for scholars studying slavery and its roots in Africa, one of the few first-person accounts by a slave of the brutal cross-Atlantic trip known as the Middle Passage.