New on CWL's Personal Bookshelf: Slave Ships
The Slave Ship, A Human History, Marcus Rediker, Viking Press, 434 pp., hardcover. 36 b/w illustrations, 7 maps, index, end notes, 2007. $27.95.
Rediker, a professor at the University of Pittsburgh, has written previously about the Atlantic pirates, laborers on Atlantic maritime trade in the colonial through early national period, and authored Who Built America? Working People and the Nation's Economy, Politics Culture and Society: Volume 1. Human labor in the early and middle periods of U.S. history is his field of speciality. A master of the telling anecdote, he has no obvious ideological axe to grind other than to tell story of laborers, the good ones, the bad ones and the ugly ones.
My goal is to read it by the last week of December.