Sufferings in Africa: Library Edition

Young American sea captain James Riley, shipwrecked off the coast of north Africa in 1815, was captured by nomadic Arabs and sold into slavery. This dramatic account of Riley's trials and sufferings, wildly popular in his day, was read by a young and impressionable Abraham Lincoln. The degradations of a slave existence and the courage to survive under harrowing conditions have rarely been recorded with such painful honesty.