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9780300198294

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This is a book that captivates, that draws you immediately into both its story and its argument and then invites you along for the most delightfully jostling of rides. The urgency of the present tense, the energy of the action, the vividness of the metaphors: this kind of craft brings the pleasure back to reading history, allows us to exercise our imagination. Yet Levine's compelling narrative is blended, throughout, with the kind of deft, nuanced analysis that would never allow Jan Tzatzoe's tale to be merely another anecdote about a cultural intermediary operating within colonialist power structures. A Living Man from Africa thus becomes both a surprising, humane intervention in the historiography and a sustained meditation on the nature of history. It is astonishing to see what Levine has uncovered about the life of a spiritually inclined Xhosa man in the first half of the nineteenth century. It is even more astonishing to realize that Levine has enlisted his readers in an effort to rediscover the humble joy of pursuing mystery and possibility. We are delighted to inaugurate Yale University Press's new series, New Directions in Narrative History, with this exemplary piece of historical scholarship and writing. --John Demos (Yale University) and Aaron Sachs (Cornell University), series editors.<br><br>--John Demos and Aaron Sachs

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Roger S. Levine is associate professor of history at Sewanee: The University of the South.

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