Cane River

Rating:
Summary: I couldn't put it down
Review: This is an excellent book. Get it and read it. Thats all you need to know.

Rating:
Summary: Heartbreaking, yet triumphant.
Review: Cane River is the heartbreaking, yet triumphant, journey through four generations of black women born into slavery along Cane River, Louisiana. Each generation gathering strength and momentum from the last.

Elizabeth, the matriarch of the family, watches helplessly as her daughter Suzette, then her granddaughter Philomene and finally her great granddaughter Emily are forced to bear the children of the white plantation owners. A "bleaching of the line" as she refers to it. Women forced to bear children who will never be legitmized nor inherit the land and property of their fathers. Yet each women able to better the life of herself and that of her children.

I cried with these women in their heartbreaks. Heartbreaks such as being permanently seperated from their family in slave auctions. Children ripped from the parents, women ripped from their husbands, sisters ripped from their brothers.

However, I rejoiced with these women in their triumphs. Triumphs such as Emily, born to a slave women, but yet given the opportunity to attend school where she learned to read and write.

I commend Lalita Tademy on her first novel, part fact part fiction, tracing the lineage of her ancesters and telling their unforgettable stories.

Rating:
Summary: More Colorful Tales from the Deep South
Review: I read the book and thought it was fairly well written. I come from a fith Generation Caribbean family which decended from the same kind of mixed lineage that this novel dipicts. The 'Mullatto Ascendency' took root in the Caribbean region after 1833 and the emancipation of slavery. The white planatation owners where too scared to remain on the plantations after how they had treated the slaves so they fled back Europe and the United States. Their half white sons and daughters, offspring resulting ultimately from rape and/or other encounters with slaves, rose to great power in the Caribean. They now owned boundless achreages of land and were the new mover and shakers of the society. By the rearly 1860s The Mulattos had replaced their exiled white parents and became the new 'quasi platntocracy'.

This book really hit home because of the similarities in the thinking of black people at that time. In the book, the former salves where alloed to own nothing. Not even that which was willed to them by their white benefactors. In the Caribbean it was quite the opposite. The money that had given the whites planters power was now in the hards of the lighter skinned, 'Negre Rouge', black people. The status quo of subjugation and discrimination remeained. This time the subjugation took the form of black on black mistreatment. There still stood a great divide bwetween the haves and have nots that is still prevelant in certain Caribbean contries today (i.e. Jamaica and Hati).

I found the book very poignant and colorful at times and depressingly realistic at others. It appreared almost as if Mrs, Tademy was guided by the spirits of her ancestors to accurately represent and account for their lives and accomplishments. It mattered not that skin color was a source of pride or shame. It mattered only that these women were able to assess the socio-economic indicators at the time and quite craftily manipulate them into some semblence of a different or better life for themselves and their children. In a time when skinn color was the ultimate indicator of what chances you had in life, the characters did the best they knew how and managed to etch a life out of nothing. I would have liked some more follow up detail on some of the later decendats as to where they ended up to this day. However the color comentary, pictures and historical archives present a compelling and realistic portrait of life on Cane River.

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Rating:
Summary: great story one is not able to put the book down
Review: i was afraid to finish the book because i did not want the story to end. thats how much i loved this story.

Rating:
Summary: This is an EXCELLENT book
Review: This book is a very colorful story of four generations of women. It immediately draws you in. I had trouble putting it down...

Rating:
Summary: Sad but true
Review: I found this book engaging, and interesting. I commend Ms. Tademy on this novel. I just don't understand why generation after generation these women thought pairing up with a white man would make their lives any better. Generation after generation were duped out of what was rightfully thier's, and many of the children were never legitimized. Also, there was comtempt among the lighter blacks and darker blacks when the lighter ones were just slightly better off. They never seemed to learn year after year that you can have a white daddy, go to their schools and learn their language, but you'll never be equal because of your black blood.

Rating:
Summary: Not for serious readers of literature or history
Review: Congratulations to Lalita Tademy for leaving her job as a CEO to research and write a book. One imagines that she was better at business then prose. To be kind, the writing is slip shod. No characters, not even the main ones, are more than stick figures. Why they make the choices they do is left a total mystery. Tademy has bravely taken on the ambitious task of telling the stories of three of her ancestors, two of whom lived much of their lives as slaves in Louisiana. She's bitten off far too much, often jumping the story years ahead seemingly at whim. I literally tossed the book in the air at the mention of Lincoln assuming the presidency in November 1860 (the month of his election, four months before taking office). For serious students of history, Cane River is more annoying than enlightening.
Cane River is about important and compelling issues that surrounded the lives of many female slaves. Such a book should not be left in the hands of novice.

Rating:
Summary: The hypocrisy of slavery in all its splender
Review: This is a very good book, and is definitely worth reading. Ms. Tademy's family history seems to be particularly full of the worst examples of the hypocrisy and contradictions raised by American slavery. Typically, when we hear about slavery, it's portrayed as the classic black-and-white issue (literally). However, one of the most amazing things about Ms. Tademy's portrayal is how it shows that slavery (and the societal structure that followed it) was hardly that simple. By the time you get down to the third generation in this book, you're reading about someone who was only a quarter black, and whose kids were only 1/8th black. Yet they're as low on society's todem pole as if they had been imported directly from Africa. Slavery didn't make any sense to begin with (at least from a moral point of view), and Ms. Tademy's account perfectly highlights the fact that even the one, stupid justification that was ever offered for it wasn't consistently adhered to.

While the story is complex, Ms. Tademy's writing style is fairly simple. The story is told in a linear way. The character development is good, although there isn't a lot of variety among them. The three main protaganists all seem to be very similar (hard headed women who are determined to find acceptance in white society, but who ultimately end up disappointed). The dialogue is unvarying no matter who is talking -- white or black, young or old. There aren't any deep metaphors or hidden meanings (if there were, they were too hidden). These are the sorts of the things that I require to get my fifth star.

Still, I am very glad to have read this book, and have already recommended it to others.

Rating:
Summary: Great Historical Fiction
Review: Cane River is an unblemished written novel that unwraps a historical past into a work of fiction that was strongly inspired by years of research, historical facts, and knowledge from family members. The premise of this novel is to merely tell the story of four generations of women born into slavery along the Cane River of Louisiana. From Elisabeth , who is the matriarch of this family, down to Emily, who is Lalita Tademy's great-grandmother, these women showed their persistence to keep the family strong, even through their adversities. Elisabeth, the predecessor of Suzette, Philomene, and Emily irrevocably set a barely spoken undertone that pulsates the thoughts of each of these three primary descendant, but who takes these connotations to heart as society changes from the enslavement of blacks to 'freedom with inequalities'. "You were raised for quality or better" is a very familiar quote noted throughout the novel. As each generation surface, the meaning of the phrase increasingly transforms from an aspiration for better based on integrity and desire to an earning of better based on skin color. You ponder over the choices these women were forced to make in order to improve the lives of the generations to come. This novel provides you with a further understanding of those times and the choices (if they can be called choices) that our own ancestors had to make to survive.

Lastly, Cane River is poetic, profound, and passionate. It's beautifully written script is highly motivating and endowed. Lalita Tademy did a great justice and honor to the members of her family with her rendition of their history. Even with its length, the story moves swifly as one eagerly turns the pages. This is definitely a novel you will never forget.

Rating:
Summary: So why is it hard for the people of this country to believe
Review: Jefferson himself could have fathered 14 children with Sally Hemmings. This book makes non-believers have to wonder. Yet the people of color in this country are not seen as a part of the white mans self., and yet we are to feel their pain in times of crisis such as 9/11. The only thing I hated about this book was that it ended. I enjoyed it so much because every black person in this country whose ancestors came over in slavery experienced the same history.