Island on Fire: The extraordinary story of Laki, the volcano that turned eighteenth-century Europe dark

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Island on Fire is really good even though it is not what I expected at all. I thought it would be another disaster book where it follows a few people as they attempt to run from a lava spewing volcano. A Pompeii redux, if you will. No Laki is more of a slow burn which slowly kills a ton of people through famine and ash. And since it was 1783, there was little anyone can do about it. Jill Lepore in New York Burning notes that: “Thirty-five percent of all slave rebellions in the British Caribbean took place at Christmastime.” It’s high time that we had a book like the splendid one Tom Zoellner has written: a highly readable but carefully documented account of the greatest of all British slave rebellions, the miseries that led to it, and the momentous changes it wrought.”—Adam Hochschild, author of Bury the Chains

Tom Zoellner tells the story of Sam Sharpe’s revolution manqué, and the subsequent abolition of slavery in Jamaica, in a way that’s acutely relevant to the racial unrest of our own time. Island on Fire is impeccably researched and seductively readable. ” — Madison Smartt Bell, author of All Souls’ Rising In the new rom-com Fire Island, written by comedian Joel Kim Booster and now streaming on Disney Plus and Hulu, the eponymous island is shown in all its summer glory. Located just a train (and ferry) ride away from New York City, this barrier island off the Long Island coast has been an iconic destination for the queer community since the early 20th Century. Remarkable to me was the retribution against white missionaries as well as the massive burning of Baptist and Methodist churches, seen as to blame for the uprising and the loss of income. Only when a leading politician of the island had the foresight to see such activity would only make matters worse for the slaveholders with the British Parliament did the violence abide.Island on Fire is a gripping account of the five weeks when Jamaica burned in a rebellion led by enslaved preacher Samuel Sharpe. Tom Zoellner recounts these dramatic events with great energy and detail, crucially setting Sharpe’s story—which until now has not been well known away from the island—in the wider context of the struggle for abolition on both sides of the Atlantic. ” —Carrie Gibson, author of Empire’s Crossroads The abolitionist movement had continued in England with stories being published of atrocities in the colonies and movements to boycott sugar. The children of plantation owners sometimes faced discrimination or ridicule when enrolling in prestigious universities for the ill-gotten wages of their parents. Much like the United States, the nation was increasingly divided but with a growing movement toward a solution that ultimately included abolition. On the night of December 27, 1831, a watchman standing on top of the courthouse in the Jamaican city of Montego Bay spotted a fire on a hillside south of town. Then another fire appeared close by. Then another.

I especially liked the last chapter where Zoellner looks at the other events which have been credited as being the driving force for emancipation in the British Caribbean. At no point did this book feel like it was trying to lead me towards a conclusion, it presents as a statement of the known history. It is careful to point out the potential bias of existing historical evidence.

This story is told some of you point of Julia who is passed away recently and it's following her grieving husband best friend Renee and her neighbor around the island and making sure that everyone is ok after she is gone. As she tells the story we get many stories about Fire island and how people fall in love, get divorced and heal. Zoellner quotes Verene Shepherd describing the unnamed woman rumoured to have started the first plantation fire in the 1831 Christmas Uprising: