Rare is the book of history that remains in print over eighty years later, but James’s ground-breaking account of the Haitian Revolution—written in 1938, revised in 1962, and meant to inspire and celebrate the revolutions of the oppressed in both moments—has become a part of history itself. And the book itself remains a marvelously readable telling of a crucial, stunning, and still poorly understood event. James (a Marxist) often pays more attention to factions and classes than the personalities that popular historians usually build their stories around, but even he can’t resist the phenomenon of Toussaint L’Ouverture, a slave until he was 45 and then, for a decade, one of the most capable and consequential people on the planet, whose tragic career shows, as James writes, that “Great men make history, but only such history as it is possible for them to make.”
—Tom Nissley, Phinney Books, Seattle, WA
Having read The Black Jacobins, C.L.R. James’s still-classic 1938 account of the Haitian Revolution, earlier… [Ed: See above], I was curious what a modern version could add to the story. Even more than James, Hazareesingh focuses on the miraculously compelling figure of Toussaint Louverture, and from the mists of legend is able to create the picture of a man. Inevitably, the first 45 years of his life, spent largely in undocumented slavery, can only be speculated about, but once he ascends to power, there is a wealth of records to work from—much of it from Toussaint’s own voluminous letter-writing—and by carefully tracking Toussaint’s maneuvers through the tightest of domestic and international squeezes and by documenting his self-educated and sometimes idiosyncratic wisdom, he makes you understand both the brilliant improbability of his success and the tragedy of his personal failure, just as his country was headed toward independence.
—Tom Nissley, Phinney Books, Seattle, WA
Take a deep dive with books from Phinney Books and other independent bookstores. (Tom even has a kids’ book on the Haitian Revolution to recommend!)