Over the years, Frederick Douglass's extraordinary life – his escape from bondage and his subsequent career as one of the most influential abolitionists of his day – has attracted an enormous amount of scholarly attention. For almost a quarter of a century, William McFeely's monumental biography has laid some claim to being the definitive modern study of Douglass, and it certainly remains the most comprehensive work currently available. Initially, then, this reader was left wondering what Margaret Aymer's slim volume – a mere ninety-eight pages of text – has to say that might cast Douglass in an entirely fresh light (p. 29). After just a few pages, those doubts quickly began to dissolve. Put quite simply, New Testament scholars, beginning with Vincent L. Wimbush in his African Americans and the Bible (2001), and now Aymer, who takes issue with him, have identified a crucial aspect of Douglass's thought hitherto virtually ignored by historians. That the increasingly bitter antebellum American debates over slavery, including Douglass's powerful contribution to those debates, rested, as they had long rested, in large measure upon diametrically different readings of both the Old and the New Testaments, has long been a self-evident truth to historians. Yet, as Aymer correctly points out, very little detailed attention has thus far been paid to the precise nature and consequences of Douglass's actual engagement with, his readership of, the Bible. More specifically, asks Aymer, how and why did he employ it, and particularly the Epistle of James, to formulate his influential ‘reading of darkness’ in slavery and the Christian socio-political regime of the Southern states that depended upon it. What follows is a textually dense, and entirely convincing, analysis of Douglass's reading, and employment, of the Epistle of James and, more especially, of chapter iii, verse 17 that depicts the world as ‘darkness’. As succinct as it is, Aymer's study of this most fundamental of sources for Douglass's religiously inspired thinking about the world in which he lived, the world from which he had escaped, and the world that he struggled so hard to change, is both a compelling and a highly original contribution. It is only to be hoped that its readership will not be limited to New Testament scholars. Although perhaps not a book for general readers, historians of American slavery and abolitionism, as well as those interested in the life and career of Frederick Douglass, will find much of value in Aymer's study.