And I understand what’s to like: the life Life aims to represent has been an incredible one, and Richards affects a revelatory intimacy that, as you might wish, is both amiable and caustic. I’ve nodded along-or maybe plain lied in agreement-when people extol Keith Richards’s memoir, Life. Twain? -Caity Weaver, GQ writer and editor
While Jim, the affable slave friend of Huck Finn, exclaims things like “Lawsy, I's mighty glad…,” Frederick Douglass makes observations like “I love the pure, peaceable, and impartial Christianity of Christ: I therefore hate the corrupt, slaveholding, women-whipping, cradle-plundering, partial and hypocritical Christianity of this land.” You were saying, Mr. It's also an invigorating revenge story: Douglass identifies slave owners by name and hometown, detailing their crimes with such specificity that their descendants will be embarrassed forever.
Alternatively, read Frederick Douglass's firsthand account of slavery, which is equal parts shocking and heartbreaking. He did, as is evidenced by this, his book of tedious, meandering stories-but he also wrote a lot of richly entertaining meandering stories that are not constrained by the ham-fisted narration of a fictional backcountry child or suffused with his sweaty imitation of a slave talking. The worst crime committed by Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is that it makes first-time Twain readers think Twain wrote tedious, meandering stories.
