| Greg
Grandin draws this title from a 1915 W.E.B. Du Bois quote:"Raphael
painted, Luther preached, Corneille wrote, and Milton sung; and
through it all, for four hundred years, the dark captives wound to
the sea amid the bleaching bones of the dead; for four hundred years
the sharks followed the scurrying ships; for four hundred years
America was strewn with the living and dying millions of a
transplanted race; for four hundred years Ethiopia stretched forth
her hands unto God." Grandin is the author of a number of prize-winning books, including The Empire of Necessity: Slavery, Freedom, and Deception in the New World (2014), which won the Bancroft Prize in American History and was shortlisted for the Samuel Johnson Prize in the UK. Nobel Prize winning author Toni Morrison called Grandin's book "compelling, brilliant and necessary." Released in early 2014, the book narrates the history of a slave-ship revolt that inspired Herman Melville's novella masterpiece, Benito Cereno. A professor of history at NYU and a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, Grandin is also the author of Fordlandia: The Rise and Fall of Henry Ford’s Forgotten Jungle City which was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in History, as well as for the National Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award. He writes on US foreign policy, Latin America, genocide, and human rights. He has published in The New York Times, Harper’s, The London Review of Books, The Nation, The Boston Review, The Los Angeles Times, and The American Historical Review. In August he released Kissinger’s Shadow: The Long Reach of America’s Most Controversial Statesman (2015). Professor Grandin's interview with Democracy Now!, aired on February 6, 2014, can be seen here. A review of Empire of Necessity, published by the New York Times, on January 10, 2014, can be read here. |
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