Reviews
"Bilby deserves enormous credit for creating a book faithful to the actual voices of a community more readily exploited by the modern world than understood in their own terms. . . Short of going to Jamaica and talking with Maroon leaders, if you're able to gain their trust, this book is the best way to enter their world."
--THE BEAT magazine
"Bilby successfully shows how Jamaican Maroon communities and strong Maroon identity have perdured, and that the lives of individual Maroons are still grounded in Maroon history. Recommended"
--CHOICE
"A must-have for every library and a must-read so that Jamaicans can learn the contradictions of their complex, multifaceted heritage from the lips of their fellow Jamaicans, with resonance from scholars of many nations who hold their culture in high esteem."
--Jamaica Gleaner Online
...will surely be long regarded as the definitive study of the Jamaican Marrons...
--Provisions Library--Resources for Arts and Social Change
Bilby's accessible, well-written, carefully researched book offers an absorbing, welcome, and persuasive corrective to earlier accounts on the Maroons of Jamaica…
--Journal of Anthropological Research
Bibly has done both scholarship and the Maroon communities a great service to have recorded these cultural moments before they disappear.
--Jamaica Gleaner
True-Born Maroons, the fruit of twenty years of fieldwork in Jamaica, is no doubt the last word on the island's runaway slaves and their descendants. As a record of a fast-vanishing culture, Kenneth Bilby's book moreover has a moving valedictory tone."
--Times Literary Supplement
…a fully developed, impressive analysis and a valuable resource that demonstrates in an exemplary fashion that those who collect data can just as skillfully allow the informant voices to speak for themselves.
--Journal of Pidgin and Creole Languages
" The Defining work on Jamaican Maroons and has left scholars with a wealth of information to explore in the future. With this text Kenneth Bilby has established himself as the pre-eminent scholar on the subject."
--Southern Historians
" Bilby's vividly written and illustrated book makes an essential contribution to the study of the Caribbean and the African diaspora and will be a critical reading to scholars interested in religion and ritual, language and folklore, place, history, and memory."
--American Ethnologist
" This is an excellent study of the Maroons. All students of Maroon societies and of slavery in the Americas will find this an invaluable book."
--Caribbean Studies