Customer Rating: 
Summary: Should be in every library
Comment: Though I am skeptical about most 'history,' this book was written by a man who felt oppression and fought it. This book as well Douglass' other writing should be the primary source on slavery and the civil war.
This book, as well as its excellent forward, serves to warn that slavery could happen here again disguised as something else. It reminds us that slavery is not an institution but a crime.
This edition is the best as far as size and print quality. It has also best foreward and the best afterward. I hope Signet continues to keep this edition available.
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Summary: KINDLE EDITION: Excellent!
Comment: I wrote this review to mention the Kindle Edition. Many lower-priced Kindle editions of books have bad formatting problems that make the book difficult or even impossible to read. Not this one! I found the formatting was excellent throughout. In two places the footnotes were slightly misplaced, but it was easy to figure out from context what the text was. In general, the Kindle formatting was better than many more recent (and expensive!) books.
The content was also excellent (as other reviewers have noted), hence the 5 stars. I've read of Frederick Douglass' life from other sources, but this was the first time I'd read his account.
The introduction by other authors was written in a style that now feels very anachronistic. It was hard to get through those.
Frederick Douglass' account, however, was fresh, engaging, and direct. I found it hard to put down. Descriptions of the atrocities of the time were very personal and not couched in the melodrama of the introduction. I think that made his account even more powerful. His description of his self-education in Baltimore was absolutely stunning and inspirational.
This autobiography, from such a pivotal figure in American history, would already be required reading at any price. But the accessibility and readability of this edition make it a must-have for a Kindle.
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Summary: Forecasting King Leopold's Ghost
Comment: One of the fifth grade teachers at Braeburn Elementary in Houston once told us that "Slaveowners had to treat their slaves well in order to get them to work. Just like a horse. If you are cruel to a horse it won't do what you want."
This type of happy apologia for slavery was still alive and openly espoused in the Houston Independent School District in the 1970's, and done in front of white, black, Hispanic, and Asian children. Perhaps Mrs. Allen would have benefited from reading Frederick Douglass's autobiography. Perhaps not.
Frederick Douglass's story proves the axiom that for every life ennobled by adversity and poverty, ten thousand others are ground up in misery and waste. Douglass achieved fame, literary recognition, and assumed the role as public conscience of America during its slaveholding epoch. Douglass famously reproached the president when he believed Lincoln had backed away from his commitment to end slavery, and boldly praised the 16th President when he issued the Emancipation Proclamation.
Douglass's uncompromising hatred of slavery and his tireless efforts to lay bare its horrors make this book a bitter testimonial to the evils of human bondage as it was practiced in the South and condoned by the U.S. Constitution. Anyone alive today who doubts that he is an heir to the sins of slavery need only read this book.
Douglass's autobiography takes particular care to describe the physical maiming that sadistic southerners inflicted on African Americans. The beatings, the hideous torture, the murder, and the rapine practiced by slaveholders are all held up in this book for readers to quail at and digest, if they can.
If there is any lesson beyond the Lincolnesque conclusion "If slavery is not wrong, nothing is wrong," Douglass's monumental work testifies to the boundless capacity for torture practiced by whites of European descent towards Africans. Immediately after reading this book I read King Leopold's Ghost by Adam Hochschild, and was amazed at the continuity between Douglass's description of slavery and Hochschild's description of slaughter, oppression, and murder in the Belgian Congo.
These two books should definitely be read in tandem; each acts as a historic bookend of sorts to the gruesome racial predations of their respective generations, footnoted with the few and feeble efforts of those who opposed acts that can only be described as the most depraved and unforgivable crimes against humanity.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Frederick DDOuglass Review
Comment: It had some writing in it, but overall a good deal for the price. Thanks
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Summary: Freedom through Abolitionism in th 19th Century
Comment: 87 years after the Declaration of Independence, the Emancipation Proclamation was enacted and after the the ratification of the 13th Amendment to the Constitution Enslaved Americans gained thier freedom.
Before the civil war Abolitionist were the Advocates of change in America the struggle to gain ones freedom from the experiences of slavery in the south is told from the true experiences of Fredrick Douglass. From Slavery to the Struggle for freedom to escape is the story told here, but also the story of survival to activism in the Abolitionist movement to change America.
During the nearly 100 years after the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution of 1787 Black America finally found Freedom, But between Slavery and Freedom was the struggle of the freedom fighters of the Revolutionary Abolitinist Movement to bring slavery in America to an end. This is the story of the virtues of a victim of Slavery turned into a revolutionary success story, This is the story of Fredrick Douglass.
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