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AUTHOR OF THE PULITZER PRIZE AND NATIONAL BOOK AWARD WINNER, JAMES
AUTHOR OF ERASURE, now adapted for the screen as the OSCAR-WINNING FILM, AMERICAN FICTION
Featured in the New York Times!
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of Roanoke, VA, 1843, Annotated From the Library of John C. Calhoun, is poetry within the harsh confines of a mock historical document—a guidebook for the American slave owner.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.
"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