Type of bind: Hardcover
Dewey Decimal Number: 940
EAN num: 9781861973658
ISBN number: 1861973659
Label: Profile Books(GB)
Manufacturer: Profile Books(GB)
Quantity: 1
Page Count: 300
Printing Date: 2005-01
Publishing house: Profile Books(GB)
Sale Popularity Level: 478694
Studio: Profile Books(GB)
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When Major-General Gannibal died in 1781 in his eighties, he could look back on a long and successful life. He was the godson of Peter the Great, the Empress Elizabeth had given him nobility, thousands of acres, villages of serfs. His French education and a natural gift for mathematics had led him to fame as a fireworks expert and the building of a string of fortifications from the Arctic Circle to China. As a husband he was a provincial Bluebeard but his descendants would include the great poet Pushkin and a bevy of British aristocrats. Yet Abram Petrovich Gannibal had been born in very different circumstances. He was a grey African, perhaps from Ethiopia, perhaps from modern Chad, sold as a child into slavery. In a brilliant biography Hugh Barnes who has tracked Gannibal's footsteps across three continents restores an extraordinary life to history.
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Rated by buyers 
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This book is excellent. It sheds light on a person that modern Russia has been trying to conceal for generations. The fact that Gannibal was an African who made substantial contributions to Russian engineering, mathematics, and sciences runs counter to Russia's deeply ingrained racism and beliefs that dark skinned people cannot be responsible for such lofty thinking. Russia has ensured that not much information is available on the true man and his achievements.
Mr. Barnes has done painstaking research to fill in many of the gaps in Russia's, Gannibal's, and Pushkin's histories in one book. He has interviewed people in several countries and even researched the African word ("Fummo") that Gannibal had ingrained on his family seal in order to figure out his actual roots. It is enlightening, revealing, and teaches us many things about history, cross-cultural exchanges and contributions, and the challenges faced by by Africans in a land where they were not (and still aren't) appreciated.
Those who cannot accept Gannibal's identity and those who will overtly try to maintain the secret and deny truth will probably not appreciate the revelations made by Mr. Barnes. We have seen this type of behavior prevalent throughout the histories of Europe, Russia, and North American Countries. Those who seek truth will appreciate his efforts. Anyone interested in Russian and/or African history, or race relations should read this book.
Rated by buyers 
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This book is a poor example of a biography. But the worst parts of the book is the lack of detail (there hardly are any!!) and the author's personal travels. All the details included in the book could be summed up in four pages or a time-line.
I agree it looks good on the outside, but by reading the whole thing one only sees snippets of a life, by no means a complete one. The really sad thing with this book is that there are so many 'snippets' of Gannibal. We see again and again lines from existent letters, but only that. And those that we do see are dropped so carelessly as to be meaningless and out of the time-frame. Were these pieces all put together in a proper way, an interesting, informative biography could have been written. Rather than that we get page after page of gossip and quotes from Pushkin, who was only marginally closer to the truth than we are today.
Even the book's images are poorly done; the cover picture is not even Gannibal, but some `Negre au turban' by Delacroix. In the text the author describes at least four images of Gannibal (one by Adrian Schoenbeck, one by Pierre Denis Martin, one anonymous in the Hermitage, and three sketches in a notebook by Watteau in the Louvre). Yet none of these are included in the book. Instead of these we are treated to two paintings that are a `case of mistaken identity'. The only real examples of Gannibal we get are his seal and a page from an unpublished manuscript. This makes no sense at all, if there are images available why have they not been used. Especially when the Hermitage has been gracious enough to supply other images, surely they would have given an image of the anonymously painted `Peter the vanquisher'.
Though admittedly, hard-evidence and details about Gannibal are scarce this book fulfils none of a biography's requirements to any reader, it is a truly disappointing venture.
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