Island on Fire: The extraordinary story of Laki, the volcano that turned eighteenth-century Europe dark

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The book then shifts to incorporate our understanding of Iceland's 2010 Eyjafjallajökull eruption. Because the Laki eruption was larger in magnitude and severity than the Eyjafjallajökull eruption of living memory, they make a good argument for how much more devastating a modern Laki-level eruption would be by comparing the two incidents. The air travel groundings and supply chain disruptions definitely rang true because of what we're going through with the COVID-19 pandemic. An important contribution to our understanding of what Saidiya Hartman has described as the ‘afterlife’ of slavery. Zoellner documents in vivid detail the base violence and inhumanity of institutionalized slavery in plantation-era Jamaica. But he also tells a story of irrepressible resistance and self-organization that generated the slave rebellion of 1831… His storytelling ability makes this history extremely readable, if not less painful. ” —Abigail Bakan, Jacobin

He then added a postscript, knowing that one company of a badly-trained militia would not be sufficient to prevent the white population from being massacred. I love science when it tells how things work. I hate science when it makes me feel like I got no control. The latter is how I feel after reading Island on Fire. I truly understand there is an arrogance in humans. We believe we are far more in control than we are. I don't know if this is a by product of consciousness where we understand how to reason. But then turn it around and having so little control we demand to have it. The need for control is why people need conspiracy theories or decide to ignore issues and problems that are so big, like climate change, that we deny their existence. It’s high time that we had a book like the splendid one Tom Zoellner has written: a highly readable but carefully documented account of the greatest of all British slave rebellions, the miseries that led to it, and the momentous changes it wrought.”—Adam Hochschild, author of Bury the Chains This story is told some of you point of Julia who is passed away recently and it's following her grieving husband best friend Renee and her neighbor around the island and making sure that everyone is ok after she is gone. As she tells the story we get many stories about Fire island and how people fall in love, get divorced and heal. Zoellner’s vigorous, fast-paced account brings to life a varied gallery of participants… The revolt failed to improve conditions for the enslaved in Jamaica, but it crucially wounded the institution of slavery itself.”—Fergus M. Bordewich, Wall Street JournalI thought it was a unique take, using death as part of the story of love, friendship, and having one last Summer on Fire Island to be with her husband in spirit, try to move forward. We're all strapped to a giant bomb. That's the inevitable bottom-line conclusion of reading anything at all about volcanoes. Witze and her co-author Kanipe are ostensibly writing a book about Iceland's Laki volcano, which blew up in 1783 and caused misery and death around the world (maybe--jury's not totally in.) But there's only so much to say about that, so several of their chapters stray into topics like: Samuel Sharpe, a slave, was a Baptist deacon whose literacy and commitment to his faith made him dangerous. In 1830s Jamaica, the phrase "Am I not a man, and a brother?" posed a challenge to the white aristocracy that nominally claimed to be Christian but treated human beings like cattle. I listened to an interview where Zoellner compares William Wilberforce's contributions to abolition to Samuel Sharpe's, and Zoellner opined that Wilberforce perhaps has received too much credit. While Wilberforce's noble leadership in the movement to abolish the British slave trade in 1807 ended the capture and tortuous voyage of men and women from Africa to the West Indies, it did not end slavery. Whereas Wilberforce thought it would be the death knell, slavery indeed lingered on in all its brutal fashion. It took actual slaves to ignite the literal spark that resulted in an irrepresible cultural and religious movement to finally abolish slavery in Jamaica and the British colonies. (Wilberforce remained a supporter of abolitionist movement until his death in 1833.) Dazzling...as funny as it is poignant, nostalgic as it is sharp." —Carley Fortune, New York Times bestselling author of Every Summer After While the rebels lost their military gamble, their sacrifice accelerated the larger struggle for freedom in the British Atlantic. The daring and suffering of the Jamaicans galvanized public opinion throughout the empire, resulting in a decisive turn against slavery. For centuries bondage had fed Britain's appetite for sugar. Within two years of the Christmas rebellion, slavery was formally abolished.

Lawson rushed to report the fires to John Roby, the collector of customs at the port, who had almost certainly already seen the flames. As the Caribbean night sky gradually turned the color of copper, Roby wrote an urgent message to the governor of Jamaica. He underlined two words, a gesture almost never seen in official correspondence. The only downside I found (which may have been due to it being an audiobook) is that it felt like it jumped around in time towards the start. At some points I had to rewind a bit to confirm where we were in the timeline. This may have been less noticeable if reading a printed copy. It ends by returning to Heimaey where the book originally started and how the parish priest - who spoke the famous 'fire sermon' that supposedly stopped the lava flow not far from the church where he was preaching - was still being recognized and revered. Island on Fire is a dramatic day-by-day account of these transformative events. A skilful storyteller, Tom Zoellner uses diaries, letters, and colonial records to tell the intimate story of the men and women who rose up and briefly tasted liberty. He brings to life the rebellion's enigmatic leader, the preacher Samuel Sharpe, and shows how his fiery resistance turned the tide of opinion in London and hastened the end of slavery in the British Empire.

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At The Guardian, read Keisha N. Blain and Zoellner on the history of “establishment thinking” that frames change as dangerous Wang Wei ( Tony Leung Ka-fai), a police officer, witnesses the murder of his father-in-law, a police commissioner, at the hands of an assassin. When the assassin attempts to escape, he is killed by a car bomb. Wei and his partner later identify the assassin but discover that he was a felon who was apparently executed in prison several months ago. Wei decides to go undercover in the prison by assaulting a group of gang members at a bar. While inside, he is immediately suspected of being a cop and is beaten in a prison-orchestrated fight, leaving him bloodied and bruised. Zoellner also points out that in the months leading up to the Christmas Uprising, another enslaved Baptist preacher named Nat Turner was guiding a slave uprising in Virginia. As Du Bois notes in his biography of the Calvinist revolutionary John Brown, the Nat Turner uprising was carefully studied by Brown, who drew lessons from it to formulate a plan for launching a wide-scale slave guerrilla war in the US. While Brown’s plan faltered into his much more modest Harpers Ferry Raid, the raid was still an important event leading up to the Civil War and the eventual abolition of American slavery. That theology might not only be an opiate of the masses, but also contradictorily a liberating force, was what figures like Nat Turner underscored. As Lepore emphasized regarding the 1741 New York insurrection:

Island on Fire is a gripping account of the five weeks when Jamaica burned in a rebellion led by enslaved preacher Samuel Sharpe. Tom Zoellner recounts these dramatic events with great energy and detail, crucially setting Sharpe’s story—which until now has not been well known away from the island—in the wider context of the struggle for abolition on both sides of the Atlantic. ” — Carrie Gibson, author of Empire’s Crossroads Time moves fast when you’re getting older. I thought it was only recently that I read about the new book by Alexandra Witze and Jeff Kanipe about the Icelandic volcanoes. I was so surprised when I saw that it came out in early 2015… damn. Volcano go boom and everyone dies. You’ve heard the story and seen the movies. But that’s not how Laki in Iceland rolls, and Alexandra Witze and Jeff Kanipe are here to tell you about it. Looking for an unconventional summer story? Toss ON FIRE ISLAND into your beach bag and get lost in an unexpectedly heartwarming story about love, grief, the people that make our lives full. While ostensibly about the Laki eruption in 1783 the authors take on on a tour of other volcanic eruptions around the world, including Katla, Tambora and the year without summer, Krakatau, and of course the then recent Eyjafjallajökull that so disrupted air-travel in Europe.I grew up in Jamaica during the 70s and half of the eighties, and due to the colonialism hangover that was/is neocolonialism, my knowledge of Jamaican history is paltry at best, bookended by Columbus and the Arawaks (Taino more accurately) and the National Heroes and Independence. This book chronicles a labour strike orchestrated by Samuel Sharpe, one of the seven Heroes, in December of 1831, that led to a fiery uprising amongst enslaved people which precipitated the abolition of slavery in the British Empire in 1834. The author provides a detailed analysis of Jamaica's early history within the Empire and the political and economic forces that made slavery the scaffolding which held up the wealth of England and her monarchy. (Looking at you Lilibet ;)) The story brought so many laughs, which you wouldn’t expect from a book that includes a death, but I absolutely loved it! But Sharpe’s uprising was different in its large-scale mobilization and its apt deployment of Baptist liberation theology that brought in more than thirty thousand (some estimates place it closer to 60,000) enslaved people into the plot, catalyzing an acceleration towards the abolition of slavery throughout the British empire. Sharpe’s homiletics gravitated towards biblical declarations of liberation, as Zoellner writes: I struggled through about 3/4 of the book and enjoyed about 1/3 of that. I was looking forward to learning about Laki, a famous volcano among geologists, but didn't, really. But it was an excellent sleep aid! Oh, well. 2.6 stars.