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Book Cover for: The Book of Training by Colonel Hap Thompson of Roanoke, Va, 1843: Annotated from the Library of John C. Calhoun, Percival Everett

The Book of Training by Colonel Hap Thompson of Roanoke, Va, 1843: Annotated from the Library of John C. Calhoun

Percival Everett

Percival Everett's The Book of Training by Colonel Hap Thompson of Roanoke, VA, 1843, Annotated From the Library of John C. Calhoun, is poetry within the harsh confines of a mock historical document--a guidebook for the American slave owner. The collection features lists of instructions for buying, training, and punishing, equations for calculating present and future profits, and handwritten annotations affirming the brutal contents. The Book of Training lays bare the mechanics of the peculiar institution of slavery and challenges readers to place themselves in the uncomfortable vantage point of those who have bought and enslaved human beings.

Book Details

  • Publisher: Red Hen Press
  • Publish Date: Jan 15th, 2019
  • Pages: 48
  • Language: English
  • Edition: undefined - undefined
  • Dimensions: 8.40in - 5.40in - 0.30in - 0.35lb
  • EAN: 9781597096287
  • Categories: American - African American & Black

About the Author

Everett, Percival: - PERCIVAL EVERETT is a Distinguished Professor of English at USC. His most recent novels include National Book Award winner James, Dr. No (finalist for the NBCC Award for Fiction and winner of the PEN/ Jean Stein Book Award), The Trees (finalist for the Booker Prize and the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction), Telephone (finalist for the Pulitzer Prize), So Much Blue, Erasure, and I Am Not Sidney Poitier. His most recent poetry collections include Sonnets for a Missing Key, The Book of Training by Colonel Hap Thompson (winner of the 2020 IPPY Award in Most Original Concept) and Trout's Lie. He has received the NBCC Ivan Sandrof Life Achievement Award and The Windham Campbell Prize from Yale University. American Fiction, the feature film based on his novel Erasure, was released in 2023 and was awarded the Academy Award for Best Adapted Screenplay. He lives in Los Angeles with his wife, the writer Danzy Senna, and their children.

More books by Percival Everett

Book Cover for: James (Pulitzer Prize Winner), Percival Everett
Book Cover for: James, Percival Everett
Book Cover for: Erasure, Percival Everett
Book Cover for: The Trees, Percival Everett
Book Cover for: I Am Not Sidney Poitier, Percival Everett
Book Cover for: Dr. No, Percival Everett
Book Cover for: Telephone, Percival Everett
Book Cover for: God's Country, Percival Everett

Praise for this book

"This is truly the most terrifying book I've read this year. The training manual imitates the teachings of a slave master, one Colonel Hap Thompson, who, for the sake of rearing good slaves, gives methodical/technical lessons in their handling -- yes, "handling" is a term used for training animals. What's most chilling is the academic presentation, as if in good faith, teaching dehumanizing, the lowest form of human conduct. This account, were it presented any other way, would be intolerable. But Everett strikes a resonant chord by using the elevated and refined language of an educated "trainer." The power is in actual reckonings -- brute force so that individuals become subhuman; and if they do not comply, subjecting them to dehumanization again and again. It's torture dignified by logic, philosophical beliefs, and white man's rhetoric."

--Grace Cavalieri, Washington Independent Review of Books

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