Word: slave
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...bulimic," says Olivia Benier, 25, who shops the Paris store. "The quality is not the best; but the real problem, it's Berezina," she says, referring to Napoleon's costly and chaotic river crossing as he retreated from Moscow. "You have to dig, sort and slave for a bargain. I wear light clothes to go shopping there because otherwise you're so hot you'd lose 50 kilos...
...Jacobs finally escaped to the North. "Sweet and bitter," she wrote, "were mixed in the cup of my life, and I was thankful that it had ceased to be entirely bitter." Though few slaves were literate, as a child she had served a sympathetic woman who had tutored her. Jacobs wrote Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl during hours snatched from her duties as a domestic. It became a success on both sides of the Atlantic, and then, according to Yellin, whose book continues where Jacobs' ends, the ex-slave's work really began. Jacobs worked with black...
...parallel tracks. In Catherine Clinton's Harriet Tubman: The Road to Freedom (Little, Brown; 272 pages), the first major biography of Tubman in more than 100 years, we see the heroine of children's books and biopics with a new clarity and richness of detail. Born a slave in Maryland, Tubman made a break for freedom in 1849, leaving her husband behind. "There was one of two things I had a right to, liberty or death," she later said. "If I could not have one, I would have the other." Like Jacobs, she wasn't satisfied with just...
Tubman died in 1913, but slavery has long outlived her. In her terrifying memoir, Slave: My True Story (PublicAffairs; 350 pages), written with journalist Damien Lewis, Mende Nazer recounts how in 1993, when she was about 12 (her people keep no birth records), she was kidnapped from her village in the remote mountains of Sudan and sold as a slave to an Arab family in Khartoum. She spent the next seven years in ceaseless drudgery. Houseguests groped her freely, and her mistress beat her regularly and even burned her with a hot ladle for serving eggs fried instead of poached...
...owners sent her off to serve their relatives in England, where she was able to escape. The book's most chilling moment comes the night before she leaves Khartoum. Nazer, then 19, was introduced to a desperate, disoriented little girl named Nanu. "Here," she realized, "was my replacement slave." At moments like this we sense the sadness of the stories we will never read, the stories of those who lived as slaves and died that way. Jacobs, Tubman and Nazer are miraculous exceptions, blessed with the iron will, steely intellect and golden luck required to survive an ordeal that spared...