How many millions of Africans were sold into slavery, died on the Atlantic crossing and suffered captivity as possessions of other humans till they died? Nobody knows, but the number is overwhelming. It was another, earlier holocaust brought about by a brutal combination of African rulers and Euro-American dealers. Unlike the survivors of the Holocaust during WW II, few Africans were literate, at least not in European languages, nor did they get access to pen and paper. So, we don't have the same number of stories. That's why this autobiography is so important. It tells in stark, yet very human terms, how a slave's life could go, from a slave's perspective. Olaudah Equiano, kidnapped at age 11, from his Nigerian village (of course, that nation had not come into existence yet), was sold and re-sold, shipped across the seas in a slave vessel with abominable conditions, then sold and sold again. He prayed continually for freedom, but did not win it for many years. Even `good' masters betrayed him, what to say of the devils who treated him worse than a dog. He survived battles, shipwrecks, the attentions of American kidnappers of freed slaves, and much more. He learned good English, reading, writing and navigation. At last, in the West Indies he bought his freedom with money he'd earned by bitter toil, returned to England and roamed no more. Born in 1745, he died in 1797, at about 52 years of age, having published this book eight years before. (From an Amazon review by Robert S. Newman)