Adeu Rinpoche’s life was extraordinary from the beginning. He was recognized by an incarnation of the previous Adeu Rinpoche and enthroned at the age of seven as the Eighth Adeu Rinpoche. As a child and teenager he mastered writing, calligraphy, poetry, astrology, mandala painting, prayer, and meditation. Then, in 1958 at the age of twenty-seven, his monastery was attacked and all sacred texts and statues were completely destroyed by the Chinese as part of the Cultural Revolution. Sentenced to fifteen years in prison for his religious beliefs, the author was sent to a remote labor camp, where he watched many of his friends die under the harsh conditions. But imprisonment had an unexpected blessing: he met many accomplished masters, including the late Khenpo Munsel, and learned many practices from them. Freedom in Bondage offers a portrait of the life and philosophy of one of the twentieth century’s most respected meditation masters—his early training in spiritual practices, his flight and capture, interrogation and sentencing, and the years in prison. His voice is calm and nonjudgmental, uplifting the reader with his compassion for his captors. The title captures the author’s inner liberation in a dire situation.

Published in 1855, My Bondage and My Freedom is the second autobiography by Frederick Douglass. Douglass reflects on the various aspects of his life, first as a slave and than as a freeman. He depicts the path his early life took, his memories of being owned, and how he managed to achieve his freedom. This is an inspirational account of a man who struggled for respect and position in life.

Between Freedom and Bondage looks at the fluctuations of black suffrage in the ante-bellum North, using the four states of New York, Pennsylvania, Massachusetts and Rhode Island as examples. In each of these states, a different outcome was obtained for blacks in their quest to share the vote. By analyzing the various outcomes of state struggles, Malone offers a framework for understanding and explaining how the issue of voting rights for blacks unfolded between the drafting of the Constitution, and the end of the Civil War.

From Bondage to Freedom was written to portray the faithfulness of God in every season I walked through from surviving the genocide at five to surviving sexual abuse at nineteen. This book is not to magnify the traumatic events I faced but to show the power of transformation through Jesus Christ and his everlasting love. The book also shows the mighty ways of God, who can turn our pain into a purpose and our mess into a message to help others overcome their pain and walk a life of freedom. The book was written to bring hope and healing to every person who experienced pain and rejection, who always felt like an outcast to the society because of their past. This book may help a victim or a broken person to know that they don't have to love in bondage forever, for there is a way to freedom where they can experience joy and peace in the midst of their situation. From Bondage to Freedom is also a message of hope that shows how one can move beyond being a victim and become someone who overcomes the pain they faced.

Born into slavery in 1818, Frederick Douglass escaped to freedom and became a passionate advocate for abolition and social change and the foremost spokesperson for the nation’s enslaved African American population in the years preceding the Civil War. My Bondage and My Freedom is Douglass’s masterful recounting of his remarkable life and a fiery condemnation of a political and social system that would reduce people to property and keep an entire race in chains. This classic is revisited with a new introduction and annotations by celebrated Douglass scholar David W. Blight. Blight situates the book within the politics of the 1850s and illuminates how My Bondage represents Douglass as a mature, confident, powerful writer who crafted some of the most unforgettable metaphors of slavery and freedom—indeed of basic human universal aspirations for freedom—anywhere in the English language.

A compelling examination of the ways enslaved women fought for their freedom during and after the Revolutionary War.

Spinoza rejects fundamental tenets of received morality, including the notions of Providence and free will. Yet he retains rich theories of good and evil, virtue, perfection, and freedom. Building interconnected readings of Spinoza's accounts of imagination, error, and desire, Michael LeBuffe defends a comprehensive interpretation of Spinoza's enlightened vision of human excellence. Spinoza holds that what is fundamental to human morality is the fact that we find things to be good or evil, not what we take those designations to mean. When we come to understand the conditions under which we act-that is, when we come to understand the sorts of beings that we are and the ways in which we interact with things in the world-then we can recast traditional moral notions in ways that help us to attain more of what we find to be valuable. For Spinoza, we find value in greater activity. Two hazards impede the search for value. First, we need to know and acquire the means to be good. In this respect, Spinoza's theory is a great deal like Hobbes's: we strive to be active, and in order to do so we need food, security, health, and other necessary components of a decent life. There is another hazard, however, that is more subtle. On Spinoza's theory of the passions, we can misjudge our own natures and fail to understand the sorts of beings that we really are. So we can misjudge what is good and might even seek ends that are evil. Spinoza's account of human nature is thus much deeper and darker than Hobbes's: we are not well known to ourselves, and the self-knowledge that is the foundation of virtue and freedom is elusive and fragile.

According to the Dictionary of American Biography, this treatise "on the most exciting topic of the age has never been excelled" due to its "thorough research, exhaustive discussion and impartial treatment" (VI:423). It begins with an early history of bondage and its construction in natural and positive law, then traces the effect of international law on freedom and bondage. Turning to the United States, he outlines the evolution of slavery under English law and the United States Constitution. One of the book's most striking features is its neutral tone. Though written on the eve of the American Civil War, it remains loyal to the tenets of legal positivism and avoids any overt ethical or political judgments. Hurd [1816-1892], a scholar of independent means, studied for a year at Yale Law School and spent two years in a law office before he was admitted to the New York bar. An expert of civil liberties, he is the author of A Treatise on the Right of Personal Liberty (1858), which is available as a Lawbook Exchange reprint.