PositiveThe AtlanticGreenidge’s The Grimkes is not a story about heroes. Instead, it is intended as an exploration of trauma and tragedy. Like the studies of the Grimkes that have preceded it, the book reflects the challenges of our own time, but Greenidge...regards these not with optimism about possibilities for racial progress but with something closer to despair ... Greenidge leaves the stature of Sarah, Angelina, Archie, and Frank diminished, but she offers an enriched view of the extended Black Grimke family ... Greenidge embraces this perspective as she connects the injustices of the present with their roots. She finds their origins embedded not just in the strictures of society and law, but in the human psychology formed in the families that racism has so profoundly shaped.
David Hackett Fischer
RaveThe New York Times Book Review... more than 900 pages long, encompassing an almost unimaginable breadth of research, information and ambition ... Drawing on extensive recent work by historians on the demographics of the slave trade, Fischer traces the multiple African sources of the waves of importations from the 17th to the early 19th century, offering a rich portrait of the variety of cultures and places from which captives came ... Fischer juxtaposes his scholarship with brief biographical portraits of African Americans who embody aspects of the larger regional context. He has been hailed as an accomplished historical storyteller who can capture a general reader, and those skills are evident here ... Although his detailed analysis focuses on the colonial period and the early 19th century, he not infrequently skips over decades and even centuries, introducing a kind of timelessness into his interpretation by compressing chronology and suggesting that the traits he has identified persist into the present ... He does not ignore or minimize the brutality, cruelty and injustice of slavery and racism, but this is nonetheless a celebratory narrative that belies his declaration in the introduction that he \'does not begin with predominantly positive or negative judgments about the main lines of American history\' ... fundamentally an appreciation of the place of Black people in America past and present, as well as an appreciation of the nation of which they became a part ... As he acknowledges, good history does indeed require us to go beyond both celebration and condemnation. Perhaps the debate his new book is likely to generate can help move us toward that goal.
Linda Hirshman
MixedThe Washington PostHirshman’s book is a lively depiction of the antislavery movement, in which the three charismatic characters at the heart of her story provide an engaging avenue into the competing philosophies and strategies that continually challenged abolitionism’s unity and effectiveness. Her writing is breezy, designed to engage readers who are not historians and whose interests may lie more in the present than the past ... The book’s depiction of the racial divisions and White prejudices at the heart of abolition will convey to a wider audience important realities that have long been recognized in more academic writings about antislavery ... But Hirshman’s expository device of the \'threesome\' distorts the underlying forces in antislavery as well as overstating the significance and distinctiveness of the connection among her three main characters.
Michael Gorra
PositiveThe Atlantic... rich, complex, and eloquent ... In setting out to explore what Faulkner can tell us about the Civil War and what the war can tell us about Faulkner, Gorra engages as both historian and literary critic ... Gorra endeavors to unknot and clarify Faulkner’s oeuvre by reconstructing it himself, but his act of literary explication is also one of participation—a joining in the Faulknerian process. Gorra renarrates these Civil War stories as he seeks to come to terms both with America’s painful racial legacies and with William Faulkner ... Gorra struggles to come to terms with the distressing views Faulkner frequently articulated on questions of racial progress and racial justice. Gorra does not look away from Faulkner’s troubling public statements or from some disconcerting stereotypes and assumptions in his literary work that became newly jarring as social attitudes shifted ... Gorra assembles quite a bill of failings, especially if we view Faulkner with the assumptions of our time and place rather than his own. Yet having meticulously acknowledged all of this, Gorra makes his claim for Faulkner the writer by reproving Faulkner the man...As Gorra presents it, the act of writing bestowed an almost mystical clear-sightedness. Yet that clarity was always challenged in the fetid Mississippi air that Faulkner, like all his characters, had to breathe. And it is that very tension, the combination of the flaws and the brilliance, that for Gorra makes his case.
