When I Was a Slave: Memoirs from the Slave Narrative Collection (Dover Thrift Editions) | 
 enlarge | Creator: Norman R. Yetman
Publisher: Dover Publications
Category: Book
List Price: $2.50
Buy New: $1.60
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Rating:  9 reviews
Sales Rank: 33023
Media: Paperback
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 157
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.2
Dimensions (in): 8.2 x 5.2 x 0.5
ISBN: 0486420701
Dewey Decimal Number: 305.567092273
EAN: 9780486420707
ASIN: 0486420701
Publication Date: July 1, 2002
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
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Product Description
More than 2,000 interviews with former slaves, who, in blunt, simple language, provide often-startling first-person accounts of their lives in bondage. Includes some of the most detailed, compelling, and engrossing life histories in the Slave Narrative Collection, a project funded by the U.S. Government. An illuminating source of information.
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| Customer Reviews: Read 4 more reviews...
Instant insight October 28, 2008
If you have never read any of the slave narratives, get this book as a start. The slave narratives written down in the 30s are amazing in the insight they give the reader. This is a reasonable selection. (There are many, many, more.)
A DEEPER DIMENSION September 27, 2008
Thanks to this book, I look at my people, Black people, in a deeper dimension. A lot of what we do today, whether food or clothes, comes from what was forced upon us in slavery. Black slave families torn apart, is the reason why TODAY, we Black people are family.
When I was a slave September 8, 2008
Extremely enlightening. First person acounts of the daily lives of real slaves in an undramatized style.
A Treasure Trove June 26, 2007
7 out of 7 found this review helpful
Norman Yetman has done every researcher of African American history a great service by his splendid compilation in "When I Was a Slave." Yetman used a precise formula for inclusion and/or exclusion in order to compile these narratives out of more than 3,000 interviews performed by the WPA in the 1930s. They are clearly representative of the entire 3,000, while at the same time of greater length and providing more detail than the 2,900 others.
Here the reader hears first-hand the voices of the ex-enslaved African American--telling his or her story with startling imagery and amazing detail. This is a one-of-a-kind collection well worth buying, reading, and re-reading.
Reviewer: Bob Kellemen, Ph.D., is the author of Beyond the Suffering: Embracing the Legacy of African American Soul Care and Spiritual Direction , Spiritual Friends: A Methodology of Soul Care And Spiritual Direction, and Soul Physicians.
This is no "Gone With the Wind" June 10, 2007
4 out of 4 found this review helpful
This is one of the most startling yet enlightening books I have ever read. Remembrances, recollections and memories of ex-slaves were gathered by Mr. Yetman and reproduced unedited (except for clarity) as a project developed by Franklin Delano Roosevelt.
Written in the 1930's when a few very elderly slaves were still living and taken directly from them, the reader gets a true sense of the inhumanity of slavery.
Althugh some slaves were treated decently (I cannot say "kindly" - that word didn't exist when it came to slaves), most were simply a product or asset on a plantation or farm.
Families were ripped apart and sold at the owner's whim - never to see brothers, sisters, mothers, fathers again.
Husbands and wives suffered the same fate.
Many were starved and beaten. Many had no place to sleep at night.
It was forbidden for them to learn to read.
The treatment, tortures and torments these poor souls endured will break the hardest of hearts.
This was not just a "Southern" way of life. There were Northerners equally guilty of these crimes against humanity.
There is simply no way to describe the less-than-human conditions that slaves endured except to read their travails for yourself.
We owe a great debt of gratitude to Mr. Yetman for preserving these remembrances of "our eternal shame".
I feel that this should be required reading in schools. And included in some way in the test for citizenship.
The book is slim and the memoirs are short and quickly read.
Although it is revolting, slavery is part of our American heritage and
every American should know that slavery was our legacy of dishonor" and will foreveer remain our eternal regret.
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