Ok, since last post I have indeed finished Bury the Chains. VERY good book. Has made me want to swear off eating sugar for good, but I know that's damned near impossible these days. Funny thing is, while reading the book, the CBC rebroadcast their 'Big Sugar' documentary, which looked at modern day sugar-cane plantations, and all the ways sugar is a very big problem in our world. Those who harvest sugar-cane on modern day plantations are living a life of slavery in all but name. Its like nothing really changed over the past two hundred years, and Bury the Chains have said that many of the Caribbean nations (like Haiti) have never really recovered from the slave rebellions that destroyed much of the island's wealth. The show Big Sugar also heavily referenced Bury the Chains, as they showed the abolitionist movement was very directly tied to sugar. They also mentioned how WHO had been trying to get a bill tabled at the United Nations about sanctioning big sugar, in order to protect children from the growing obesity problem, but the US refused to sign it and threatened to withdraw funding from WHO should anyone mention it again. Guess who is a large contributer to the Republicans? Yeah, sugar companies...

After finishing Bury the Chains, I started Knight Life by Peter David. Not bad at all and a fun little read as a re-awakened Arthur runs for mayor of New York City. I did have a slight panic attack worrying that perhaps this book might be too close to what I've come up with for the plot of my romance novel, but fortunately PAD's Lancelot is a non-factor in the book, and although Gwen might have some characteristics in common with my heroine, I think they're still different enough. The Arthur in this book was pretty good, and came off as very charismatic. Morgan was an ehn villainess, but I loved that Mordred was a top PR man. He was great. So yeah, overall, a nice book, I'll probably end up picking up the sequal, One Knight Only.

I've also been re-reading Byron's Don Juan (don't ask; personal reasons). I read this originally in second-year university, I had to do my Romantics seminar on it. I had an episode of Cheers taped where Diane was doing her psychology thesis on why Sam was a text-book case of Don Juan syndrome. Sam was a compulsive womanizer, and so yes, was a perfect example of the psychological Don Juan. However, as I read through Byron's poem, I realized that his Don Juan was not the compulsive womanizer that Sam was, rather Byron's Don Juan was more of a romantic, and it was usually always the women who pursued him. Byron's Don Juan was almost a niaf, and I found that rather fascinating, given the almost negative connotations being called a 'Don Juan' has in modern society. Byron's Don Juan isn't really what we think of as a stereotypical Don Juan. It is a lovely poem, full of romantic imagery, but also quite humourous as well. I'm having fun re-reading it. Oh, and way back when, I got an A on that Romantics seminar. Thanks Cheers :)

I started Bury the Chains, by Adam Hochschild this weekend. I'd heard about this book quite some time ago, meant to pick it up, but then completely forgot about it until I saw Hochschild interviewed on the CBC last week. Then I remembered I wanted to read this book and picked it up on Friday.

Bury the Chains looks at what was probably the world's first organized social campaign, the campaign to abolish the slave trade in Britian during the late 1700s. What is so amazing about this is that nothing like this movement had ever happened before, and those who started it were moved to do so because of the suffering of people half a world away from them. It is a remarkable thing that we, in this modern day and age, supposedly take for granted, but when we allow things like the genocides in Rwanda and Darfur to occur, well, it seems like things haven't changed all that much.

But so far, its a fascinating book. We've met some of the major players in the movement, men who were moved by the hardships and brutality suffered by slaves, some of whom had been involved in the slave trade themselves. But most interesting of all, was that the movement was really started by, and organized by, Quakers. I had never known this and found it fascinating. These men started just about every practice we take for granted today as being part of a social, reform movement; petitions, letter-writing campaigns, fund-raising, even the forerunner to political slogan-type campaign buttons.

Anyway, I'm only about half way through it, and the main players are still organizing themselves and are gathering amunition to use against the slave trade (they found huge support in the pre-Industrial Revolution city of Manchester, one of the few cities in England whose economy was not dependent upon the slave trade) and in trying to win over all-important Anglicans (for only Anglicans could vote and be Members of Parliament) to their cause.

The sections about the treatment of the slaves and what they went through is particularly horrifying, but well balanced with the more uplifting sections about the successes the abolitionists were having. It is a good strategy in the narrative, for the brutality does not become too much that it just makes you simply want to stop reading. You experience outrage, but you want to continue to see what happens and how the inevitable end, the abolition of slavery in the British Empire, comes about.