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Reading lists

9 books by Caribbean authors

There are many reasons why we love sport... and books are there to tell us why.

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Great books for the sports fan in your life

Beyond A Boundary

C L R James's infamously great 1963 cricket masterpiece - voted the third best sports book ever by the Observer - reissued in Vintage Classics for the Cricket World Cup 2019

One of the finest and most finished books to come out of the West Indies

One of the greatest books about sport, which means it is both about much more than sport – with James, who was born in Trinidad in 1901, writing about empire and immigration

C L R James, historian, novelist, cultural critic and political activist, was born in Port of Spain, Trinidad in 1901. In 1932 he joined his friend Learie Constantine in Britain, where he became cricket correspondent of the Manchester Guardian. A central figure in the Pan-African movement and the struggle for colonial emancipation, he returned to Trinidad in 1958 in its run-up to independence. He later went back to London, where he died in 1989.

'To say "the best cricket book ever written" is piffingly inadequate praise' Guardian 
 
'Great claims have been made for [Beyond a Boundary] since its first appearance in 1963: that it is the greatest sports book ever written; that it brings the outsider a privileged insight into West Indian culture; that it is a severe examination of the colonial condition. All are true' Sunday Times 
 
C L R James, one of the foremost thinkers of the twentieth century, was devoted to the game of cricket. In this classic summation of half a lifetime spent playing, watching and writing about the sport, he recounts the story of his overriding passion and tells us of the players whom he knew and loved, exploring the game's psychology and aesthetics, and the issues of class, race and politics that surround it. 
 
Part memoir of a West Indian boyhood, part passionate celebration and defence of cricket as an art form, part indictment of colonialism, Beyond a Boundary addresses not just a sport but a whole culture and asks the question, 'What do they know of cricket who only cricket know?

C L R James

James Walvin

The black Plato of our generation ... the founding father of African emancipation.

The Black Jacobins is not only a groundbreaking historical work; it is a masterpiece in story-telling and analysis.

Contains some of the finest and most deeply felt polemical writing against slavery and racism ever to be published.

The Black Jacobins is one of the great books of the twentieth century ... one that wrote the history of a people supposedly without history.

James is, quite simply, the outstanding West Indian of the twentieth century.

A starting point and an intellectual inspiration ...  a classic of masterly historical writing.

James is not afraid to touch his pen with the flame of ardent personal feeling - a sense of justice, love of freedom, admiration for heroism, hatred for tyranny - and his detailed, richly documented and dramatically written book holds a deep and lasting interest.

Revolutionarily, the book abandoned the old narrative of black victimhood in favour of accenting the agency of the formerly enslaved who, fuelled by a desire for liberty, fought to achieve autonomy.

The standard and the main text through which the Haitian revolution is studied ... a book I've read back to back many times ... An incredibly brilliant book, an undeniably magnificent contribution to scholarship.

Reading and rereading The Black Jacobins, I am struck by its incredible wit and humanity, and James' determination to write a history of slavery in the Caribbean in which people of African descent appear as thinking, feeling human agents - in other words, as the protagonists of their own history and not background characters in an essentially European story.

Dr Liam J. Liburd, Assistant Professor of Black British History, Durham University

Toussaint L'Ouverture and the San Domingo Revolution

In 1791, inspired by the ideals of the French Revolution, the slaves of San Domingo rose in revolt. Despite invasion by a series of British, Spanish and Napoleonic armies, their twelve-year struggle led to the creation of Haiti, the first independent black republic outside Africa. Only three years later, the British and Americans ended the Atlantic slave trade. 
 
In this outstanding example of vivid, committed and empathetic historical analysis, C. L. R. James illuminates these epoch-making events. He explores the appalling economic realities of the Caribbean economy, the roots of the world's only successful slave revolt and the utterly extraordinary former slave - Toussaint L'Ouverture - who led them. Explicitly written as part of the fight to end colonialism in Africa, The Black Jacobins put the slaves themselves centre stage, boldly forging their own destiny against nearly impossible odds. It remains one of the essential texts for understanding the Caribbean - and the region's inextricable links with Europe, Africa and the Americas.

C L R James

Praise for The Black Jacobins

The black Plato of our generation ... the founding father of African emancipation.

The Black Jacobins is not only a groundbreaking historical work; it is a masterpiece in story-telling and analysis.

Contains some of the finest and most deeply felt polemical writing against slavery and racism ever to be published.

The black Plato of our generation ... the founding father of African emancipation.

The Black Jacobins is not only a groundbreaking historical work; it is a masterpiece in story-telling and analysis.

Contains some of the finest and most deeply felt polemical writing against slavery and racism ever to be published.

The black Plato of our generation ... the founding father of African emancipation.

The Black Jacobins is not only a groundbreaking historical work; it is a masterpiece in story-telling and analysis.

Contains some of the finest and most deeply felt polemical writing against slavery and racism ever to be published.

Books by C L R James

Articles featuring C L R James

9 books by Caribbean authors

Great books for the sports fan in your life

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