Twelve Years a Slave (Dover Thrift Editions: Black History) Paperback – Illustrated, March 19, 2014

Twelve Years a Slave is a true account of the evils of slavery. If this account does not break your heart I would be greatly surprised. There is much deception and violence which is made myriad times worse for it being real. It shows how hard a person can allow their souls to become and is still happening today. They find a way to justify their actions, one is usually greed.I won’t say more but, I encourage you to read this book and share it with everyone you know.Purchased from Amazon for Kindle

It's difficult to be reminded of the stain of the regret that hangs over the American people of enslaving a race of persons for the sole purpose of economic gain. It was, & is, an unconscionable mark of regretful actions on the U.S. society, its people & the constitution, including the Bill of Rights. A sad, historical, account of the one human race enslaving another race for selfish gain. The cry of "Let my people go" occurs too many times throughout history, this is sadly one such case.

In 1841, Solomon Northup was a free black man living in upstate New York, with his wife and three kids. His freedom ended abruptly one day, when two men named Brown and Hamilton tricked Solomon with a promise of a job in the circus. Brown and Hamilton were just looking to take advantage of the Fugitive slave laws in the U.S. at the time, and looking to collect a quick dollar by selling Solomon back into bondage. Solomon was first kept in a holding pen in Washington D.C., and held by a man named James Burch, who claimed that Solomon was his slave, which of course he was not. It is in the slave pen where he meets Eliza, once a mistress to her master with kids from him and had some measure of freedom but she was sold to another master and now resided in the slave pen. Eliza was living the life of a slave, and suffering the emotional devastation from that fact, by constantly weeping.Solomon was transported first to Virginia and then to New Orleans, where he was bought by William Ford, a relatively kind owner who also bought Eliza, but could not afford Eliza’s children, and therefor added to her constant state of melancholy. Ford was in debt so he eventually sold Solomon to a cruel master named Tibbeats who worked Solomon day and night whipped him regularly, and nearly hung him to death, if not for the actions of an overseer named Chaplin, and a 400 dollar mortgage put on Solomon by Ford, Solomon, now called Platt, would have been a dead man that day. After more severe treatment at the hands of Tibbeats, Solomon ran away from Tibbeats and back to Ford, but the happiness Solomon felt with Ford was not meant to last.Solomon was soon no longer the property of Tibbeats or Ford, he was sold to another slaveholder in Louisiana named Edwin Epps, who seemed to share the sadism of Tibbeats, and none of the small kindnesses of Ford, when Epps was drunk he was even more cruel to his slaves. Epps had a favorite slave, named Patsey from Guinea, she could pick cotton better than Solomon and better than any other slave, male or female for that matter, but the unwanted intentions of Epps and the unwavering jealousy ofMrs. Epps made Patsey’s life intolerable. She tried to bribe Solomon to kill her, but he did not.Solomon had resolved to gain his freedom from the brutal and sadistic Epps one way or another. He wrote a letter to his friends in the North and asked a man named Armsby to deliver it. Armsby had come to Epps plantation looking for an overseer’s job. He spent several days with Epps, and Solomon somehow trusted him with his freedom, but Armsby betrayed him and told Epps about the letter In 1852 Solomon wrote another letter and asked a carpenter’s assistant named Bass to deliver it to his friends in New York State. Bass was Canadian, and vocally anti-slavery, but would he deliver Solomon’s letter, and secure his freedom?There are not enough glowing adjectives to describe this book. If you care about history, this is a must read for you. This is real history, written contemporaneously after the events of Solomon Northup’s kidnapping, and subsequent life as a slave. There is no embellishment here, there doesn’t need to be. It is just one man’s story, his harrowing experience with the peculiar institution of slavery.Solomon is first kept in a slave pen in Washington D.C. and the irony of the fact that he is being held in bondage, while just a few feet away leaders speak of freedom, that irony is not lost on Solomon. He speaks so eloquently and powerfully about freedom, real freedom, from the perspective of a man who has just had his every freedom taken from him. Today, in the atmosphere of political hyperbole that we live in, many politicians and people speak of their ‘freedoms’ being taken away by this law or that. If they can still protest the fact that laws are impinging on their rights, they haven’t lost any freedom at all.Solomon’s relationship with God is an integral part of his story. Most people in his position would be bitter and angry, but he steadfastly believed that God would one day deliver him. I find Solomon’s faith remarkable in the face of what he had to deal with every day for 12 years. Moreover, Solomon described William Ford as a ‘good Christian.’ I personally don’t think anyone who owned people as property is a good Christian, but Solomon Northrup did, and that makes him a good Christian.I implore you to read this book, it is not an easy book to read, reading about man’s inhumanity to other men in such stark terms, but it is well worth the effort.

This is a well done accounting of what slaves faced in the South and how it was condoned. Intriguing read.

That this happened to Solomon and so many others leaves me speechless.I cannot comprehend man’s mind in any way shape or form to believe that they looked at their fellow man as a horse or ox or a plow for that matter; a piece of property.

"The Journals of Lewis and Clark" is a moving, epic 19th century document of Americana that was one of the very special events in my literary life. "Twelve Years a Slave": this is another. "The Journals" is the first-person account of a triumphant trek across a still-virginal continent, full of youth and optimism. This, in utter contrast, is an account of a trip through hell, through our national shame, the antithetical document. "The Journals" was written by the voyagers themselves, and thus is full of misspellings, bad grammar, sketchy descriptions. But whereas "Twelve Years" was told by the kidnapped freeman Solomon Northup, he wisely told it to a professional writer, a journalist and poet named David Wilson. It must have been an ideal collaboration, because Northup's voice comes through consistently, there is a plethora of meticulous detail that only he could have known, it is tightly organized and the reader's attention is held throughout.And yes, it is graphic. I thought the refined, 19th century style would shield me from the raw sadism and brutality that I sensed from the movie clips I saw, but no such luck: the euphemisms and gentility seem to make the outrages all the worse. But surprisingly it wasn't the physical savagery--the whippings and punishments--that were hardest to take, or most moving; I was braced, more or less, to hear about those. It was other moments. Northup, naturally respecting the humanity of his fellow slaves, took time to get to know them as people, as individuals, even in the "slave pens" where they were held awaiting sale. One woman named Eliza was unforgettable. She had been forced to be the concubine of a plantation owner whose estranged wife, unfortunately, wound up in possession of her. Told she was finally going to be freed, along with the children she had by him--this was something the man had promised--Eliza was taken to Washington D.C. and sold off instead. As if that weren't cruel enough: shipped along with her children to a slave trader in New Orleans to be re-sold there, she watched her 10-year-old son Randall being sold first, to a separate owner. All her cries, begging and pleading and bargaining couldn't alter what she knew would be an everlasting separation. In his naive, childish attempt to comfort his mother, Randall said, "Don't cry, Mamma. I'll be a good boy." As if it HIS future conduct were any part of her agony, as if he had any idea of what his sale meant or portended. I had heard always that American slavery "separated families"; these particulars brought it home with a vengeance.There was worse to befall Eliza, to befall her still younger daughter; but I will leave that for you to discover. My watershed emotional moment won't be yours, anyway; there are too many others to count. But they are all credible, and Northup's evenhanded recital allows for (relatively) kind slaveholders and even confessions of his own shortcomings: this is an honest narrator. But the fact that we know in advance to expect a happy ending (and an eventual end of slavery, for that matter) in no way mitigates our instruction in how human ingenuity had institutionalized subjugation and devised ever-so-demonic means of enforcement. And the means were indeed demonic: on the very eve of emancipation we had gone the whole nine yards, with baroque convolutions of law and a systematic dehumanization that was almost elegant in its design. Once humans are viewed as economic means to an end, there is no stopping.It has been a full month since I read "Twelve Years a Slave" and I told myself that there were already enough good reviews, that Amazon didn't need mine. But I needed to write this, if only to mark a truly significant event in my reading life. Being fully human is not a given, and I'd like to think I became a little more human from reading this. Solomon Northup was a man of great courage and character, though he wouldn't have said so; it's his humanity that is the soul of this book, and one from which we can still learn.A note on this edition: there were many typos, and no notes. (I bought this cheap edition to fill out a shopping basket to get free shipping, if truth be told) But it didn't matter. What is here is enough.

Born as a free coloured man, Solomon Northup was tricked, drugged, kidnapped, tortured and hence sold into slavery. His name and identity were snatched away from him and he was forced to be slave and after 12 years remaining slave under various masters, he obtained freedom in January 1853. Solomon Northup penned his memoir which is a factual and detailed record of his tricking into, struggle, fight, efforts for freedom and finally attaining freedom.This memoir is divided into 22 chapters and each chapter is description of major events of these years of slavery. There are a few but potent and powerful illustrations of events. The beauty of this book lies in the fact that the narrator admitted that not all whites were mean to him. If his abductors were white so was his rescuer. It's not the colour it's the intentions, greed and lack of compassion which makes or mar a man to be human.In Northup Solomon's words, "I have no comments to make upon the subject of Slavery. Those who read this book may form their own opinions of the 'peculiar institution'. What it may be in other States, I do not profess to know ;what it is in the region of Red River, is truly and faithfully delineated in these page. This is no fiction, no exaggeration. If I have failed in anything, it has been in presenting to the reader too prominently the bright side of the picture"I recommend this book whole heartedly as it is a gem of a book. If you skip to read it you are undoubtedly missing one of the finest piece of literature.

Honestly, i thought of completing this book within 5 days as it has around 250 pages. But it is taking me more than that because of the complex words and sentence phrasing. I am using my phone to look up some words. It is a very informative book. You may feel bored initially, but my rule is to read 40 pages straight away whatever it may be.

On one level this is simply a story about a man who finds himself in hell and just wants to go home. On that level it's a page-turner.The other level is that it's a true story.In places it's not at all an easy book to read. Not because of the writing, which is straight forward and remarkably detached - Northrup wrote just to tell his story and let it speak for itself - but because of the things and the events it describes.If you've seen the film but not read the book be warned that the film does not come close to depicting the violence in the book. The film had to look away; Northrup couldn't.Northup's story is very powerful on the barbaric and brutal levels of violence, on the senseless hate, the screaming injustice, and the sheer stupidity of slavery and on the way a slave-owning society above all brutalises itself.That perhaps is the most horrifying aspect - that an entire society, with a few brave exceptions, thought all this was perfectly Christian and reasonable.

Twelve Years A Slave by Solomon Northup has been a book I have been wanting to reading for a while now and I honestly don’t know what kept putting me off. Finally getting to this book, I wasn’t prepared for this book and the emotions it was going to pull from me. I knew of the importance of this book, but I was unaware of it’s true importance and what happened, not only within the pages of this book, but with poor Solomon and his life. I honestly was naïve and embarrassed to say that I didn’t realise before going into this book, that this was in fact non-fiction, which is again, why I apricate the importance of reading and educating yourself, or myself in this case.I sat down and begun this book and I was so shocked and so absorbed in what I was reading and by what was happening within, that this was one of the few books that I actually found myself reading in one sitting. I didn’t look up until I had finished this book, not realising how much time had passed, having been taken back in time and only worried about how and if Solomon was going to become free again.This is such an important and powerful piece of literature, both for when it was released in history and for people to read and digest in todays society and one that I am glad to have finally have read. The fact that this is told from and by Solomon’s narrative is one of the reasons why this is so important and why this book has become one of my instant favourites. I know that this is going to be a book that is going to be high on my recommendation list, for its writing, for it’s content and for the fact that even in todays society, people still need reminding that everyone is equal and should be treated as so!

Amazing must read. I first watched the film and a few years later brought this book. I could not put it down or comprehend the cruelty. That people think they have the right to own or treat another human being in such away. We may argue, that it was a different time. But things have not changed! Human trafficking exists in our times still, even though another word for Slavery and not always against a black human being, as it was back in Solomon’s time. I certainly can not comprehend the cruelty of any human being to another human being. Having children ripped from your arms and sold. Being raped and constantly in fear of your life and not always for disobeying an order, but because of someones whim or satanic pleasure that can only be called monsters then and monsters today. Thankfully humanity in some people still exist. The book Twelve years a slave is wonderfully written and sadly hundreds of stories that are true and need to be written. Not hopefully for our enjoyment but giving us the understanding and knowledge not to repeat and if done and we are made aware do something about.