Wake: The Hidden History of Women-Led Slave Revolts

"Rebecca Hall’s remarkable epic is as much about the present as the past. She doesn’t just want to tell the parts of the story that are eminently drawable – desperate women attacking slavers in the streets or chiseling through chains in the holds of the death ships. Those stories are here, but they make up only half of Hall’s saga. The other half is her own struggle against the conspiracy of silence that’s shut these women out of history. Martinez’s terrific depictions of Hall’s research process are as gripping as those of the revolts themselves."