Twelve Years a Slave

The life of Solomon Northup. This book gives you an insight as to what life is like when living under a great injustice. Forgot the film, this book is hard hitting. Not only will you develop empathy with Solomon and his situation, but you will also start to see the varieties of suffering that Africa-Americans were put through. We all know about the slave trade and how terrible it was on an intellectual level. This memoir skips the intellectual and gives you a human account of what being a slave is like. 

Solomon has a rough time and you really start to feel for him and his situation. However it may actually be the other characters in the book that have a really powerful effect on you. Solomon is lucky, he regains his freedom, but what about the characters that do not? How will there lives continue and will they see any justice? Probably not.

It is a book you should read because it is about an injustice we should never forget. More powerfully, it is an injustice that we were guilty of. This is not about a horrible event that some other culture or race carried out. This is an injustice that we were at the centre of. It is a reminder of what we are capable of when we reuse to give our empathy to a particular group of people.