In his support of the abolitionist cause Douglass reported the facts of life under the regime of slavery, counteracting the arguments of those who said that the slave's life was a happy one, that indeed a slave had no worries since his food and shelter were provided for him. (These were common arguments in support of slavery.) Douglass' report of his life as an enslaved person and later as an escaped slave convey the horrors of slave owners' physical brutality as well as their psychic abuse. It is horrible when a man is beaten with a whip until his back is lacerated and bleeding. But how much more horrible is it when the man who orders the beating is his own father, and the man who ties him up is his own brother, albeit from a white mother and not a black one?

The book is violent in places, as it must be in order to tell such a story, but the violence is never sensationalized and never described in loving detail. It's there because the life of an American slave, in Douglass' experience, was frequently marked by violence.

From the opening pages, when Douglass tells us that he doesn't know the date of his birth, this gripping work really opens your eyes to what it means to not be free. Ignore all the prefatory material. The book is introduced by a few famous abolitionists of the day, whose letters served the purpose of giving the white men's seal of approval on the book in its original editions; the letters are generally uninteresting now. Dive in to the main part of the book and I suspect you'll find it hard to stop.

When you're done with deep thoughts...
If it's too hot where you are to read anything long, or in addition to the works mentioned above, you might want a few fun tidbits to get you through the second half of summer.

If you're going to MacWorld in New York this August, you might want the list of MacWorld Expo Exhibitors in JFile format from MemoWare.

If you've seen Disney's new movie Tarzan (the animation is extremely cool), read the original Tarzan stories by Edgar Rice Burroughs. Burroughs did a great job of writing fast and furious adventure tales and the story of Tarzan is modern mythmaking.

And if you're sick of slaving over a hot stove in the July heat, get yourself some quick and simple recipes from Raelani's PalmTexts page at http://www.wahine.net/palmtexts/ (it's good to break out of the usual sources for docs once in a while.) The Mongolian beef looks like a winner and wok cooking shouldn't heat up your kitchen too badly.

Mmm. Mongolian Beef. Suddenly I'm hungry. See you later!

Judith Tabron also answers to Dr. Jude; she wishes that she were in another country right now, preferably one cooler than Boston has been for the last month. She is in charge of instructional technology at Brandeis University.