A fascinating account of five slave insurrections: the Maroons, escaped slaves in the West Indies and South America who successfully resisted larger British armies while living an independent existence for generations in the mountains and jungles of Jamaica and Surinam; Gabriel Prosser, who recruited about 1,000 fellow slaves in 1800 to launch a rebellion throughout Virginia; Denmark Vesey, an ex-slave, seaman, and artisan, who conspired in 1822 to kill the whites in Charleston, South Carolina and take over the city; and the revolutionary mystic Nat Turner, who in 1831 organized and led the most successful and dramatic slave revolt in North America. The author also describes how whites responded with panic, sweeping arrests, mass executions, and more repressive laws in a futile effort to extinguish the slaves’ insatiable desire to be free.