Challenges from Exploding Steamboats discussion

Finish reading a nonfiction book that you have abandoned for at least a month. Most essay collections would count for this, but poetry collections should be strongly autobiographical in focus. I'll allow most "creative nonfiction," but it's probably best to ask first.

I have "Black Tudors, The Untold Story". I started reading this on 18 December 2017 and didn't get back to it until 3 February. This was partly because of the holidays and having other books to get back to the library, but also because certain parts of each chapter are actually rather dry for my liking. The author has taken ten black people found in records of Tudor England, told about how they came to be recorded, how they *may* have come to be in England, the people they knew and interacted with, what their jobs were, and what their social standing may have been. There were quite a lot more black people in Tudor England than many realize, and they were treated a lot more like anyone else (As long as they were baptized, non-Catholic, Christians. Most Catholics and non-baptized people were not accepted into society.). They were accepted as witnesses in legal cases. They were sometimes valued tradespeople or skilled workers. Slavery was NOT accepted in Tudor England, so if an enslaved person were brought to the country or somehow joined an English sailing ship, they were considered free. This was upheld in the courts, as there were cases of people who had illegally purchased a slave then complained when the slave absconded. The courts stood on the side of the former slave and did not make them return to their master. I think this is a valuable book, although I only gave it three stars because of the writing style (although in places it is fine!). That's a personal thing. Others might have no problem with that.

I read Wide Awake and Dreaming: A Memoir, which is a young woman's story of her life with narcolepsy with cataplexy. This was especially interesting to me because I have a close friend who suffers from this. This book is self-published, but she did a pretty dang good job with it.