12 Years a Slave

Title: 12 Years a Slave
Author: Solomon Northup
Genre: Memoir
Pages: 248
Rating (out of 5 stars): ***
Reviewed by: Ben
Description: Solomon Northup was a free black man living in New York, with a wife and several kids and a successful farm.  On a trip to Washington, D.C., he was kidnapped and sold into slavery, deep in Louisiana just a few years before the Civil War.  As the title suggests, he was a slave for 12 years before he was freed when the fact that he was a freeman was finally proven.  This book is his memoir of that experience.
Thoughts: This was a fine book, but I actually didn't enjoy it as much as I expected to.  I guess you don't really enjoy a book about slavery, but I never really seemed to into this book, and then it was finished.  The most interesting parts were about the day-to-day lives of the slaves, how their masters used fear as a constant motivator, and how the slaves adapted to this terrible form of life.  In the end, this is a fine first-hand account of what slavery was really like, but I can't say that I really learned all that much more about slavery than I already knew.  If you're looking to read a book about slavery, this one should be high on the list.  But if not, I don't know that you need to go out of your way to read it.
Disclaimer: There are a few graphic depictions of brutality towards the slaves.