Higher Ground

By Caryl Phillips

Book Overview

A searing novel about slavery and its legacy that tells multiple stories, set generations and continents apart but unified by their ambitious exploration of themes of race, power, captivity, and abuse--from "a master ventriloquist [who] giv[es] immediacy and voice to an impressive range of vivid characters about whom the reader cares deeply" (San Francisco Chronicle).

In a slave garrison in Africa, a native collaborator betrays his people and humiliates himself in order to win the favor of white men. From an American prison cell in the 1960s, a black convict tries to impart his vision of race and justice to his indifferent family. And in a dreary city in postwar England, a displaced Jewish refugee watches her youth and sanity slip down the drain of history.

Combined and in the skilled hands of Phillips, these narratives take on a devastating power.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0679763767
• ISBN13: 9780679763765
• Release Date: October 1995
• Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
• Length: 224 Pages
• Weight: 0.40 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.7" x 5.2" x 8.0"

Customer Reviews

Painful but interesting

After reading Caryl Phillip's "The Nature of Blood," a more than competent novel on racism and antisemitism, I bought his "Higher Ground."Although this book does not shed any more light on the dynamic of hate, it is so amazingly real in its portrayl of the day-to-day anguish of hate that it is almost too difficult to read. Divided into three voices (a black slave-trade facilitator, a militant black convict and a Jewish-Polish Holocaust survivor), the stories are harrowing, image-provocking and even if you don't particularly like the characters you understand them from inside. I felt that the author imparted a rare gift in this regard.An important author with something to say and unlike many writing today, a perspective wider than his own personal experience. Highly recommended.