... absorbing ... Luxenberg’s history contains so many surprises, absurdities and ironies that it would be a shame to spoil the final chapters by revealing which justice ended up on which side ... Along with the court cases and the three lovingly researched lives, Luxenberg devotes many lively and illuminating pages to race and politics in New Orleans. That’s a lot for one book. Still, the subtitle of 'Separate' is misleading. Only the last section is about Plessy, and the book is not the story of 'America’s journey from slavery to segregation' ... The subtitle is also misleading because separate and unequal extended far beyond transportation and accommodations to education, employment, health care, credit, housing and criminal justice ... Segregation is not one story but many. Luxenberg has written his with energy, elegance and a heart aching for a world without it.

Steve Luxenberg's storytelling mastery may be most evidenced by the fact that the big, sprawling swath of history he bites off in his new book... does not read like a big, sprawling, swath of history. The story feels neither distant nor lifeless, and Luxenberg's careful narrative choices creates a lucidity that saves save the book from ever feeling unwieldly, even at more than 600 pages. The story is briskly told — and that is impressive, in part because this is not a biography with the advantage of a single protagonist to focus the narrative and drive the action ... But Separate lands as intimate, perfectly interlocking portraits of some of the men and women who lived through the abolitionist- and Reconstruction-era maelstrom, and it is a dazzlingly well-reported chronicle of an important period in our history ... The book is full of detail so rich that these players insist on their own veracity ... Luxenberg repeatedly manages to tell us stories that capture both the hope and the hopelessness that has been central to America's long argument about race ... Separate is an eye-opening journey through some the darkest passages and haunting corridors of American history.

Luxenberg is a fine writer who tells this story in an engaging manner. To be sure, his apparent desire for novelistic effects sometimes gives the prose a purplish hue ... A more serious problem is the book’s structure, which undermines its narrative coherence. Most of Separate consists of alternating biographical chapters about Tourgée, Brown, Harlan and members of the Citizens’ Committee. This produces chronological confusion ... The biographical focus, moreover, leads to a relative neglect of the broader historical context. There is little discussion, for example, of the debates over the 14th Amendment when Congress approved it in 1866 or what exactly it was meant to accomplish ... The long biographical excursions are not only unnecessary but often of questionable relevance. They produce significant delay in getting to the actual case.

The reader’s great honor and delight is to follow Luxenberg as he intertwines their stories from widely singular strands at the beginning, to their historical moments on stage together in 1896 ... In explaining the lead-up to the Civil War, Luxenberg offers a clarifying analysis of the catalyzing effects of the Runaway Slave Act, particularly in the North ... With this monumental work, Luxenberg shows us precisely how [our current political landscape echoes those of the past] — through the workings of malleable law.

[Luxenberg’s] narrative, built around biographic sketches of the main characters in the case, offers a striking view of Reconstruction and of the tragic stillbirth of freedom in that era ... In [Luxenberg’s] moving portrait of the many figures who played a role in the case, he confirms that idea as well as another: that even the most hopeless fool’s errand can emerge, in time, as an unassailable triumph.

Luxenberg convincingly casts it as the culmination of America’s 50-year progression toward codified and entrenched racial separation ... In documenting this country’s fateful journey from slavery through thwarted Reconstruction to segregation, Luxenberg paints on a broad canvas, elegantly narrating several captivating and scrupulously researched stories that converge in Plessy v. Ferguson ... arguably the most intriguing character in Separate is the uniquely multiracial society of New Orleans itself.

Luxenberg has chosen a fresh way to tell the story of Plessy ... deeply researched, and it wears its learning lightly. It’s a storytelling kind of book ... Luxenberg does not engage in psychological interpretation. He doesn’t mention, for instance, that Brown’s Yale classmates called him Henrietta because they thought he was effeminate—which might have contributed to Brown’s eagerness not to appear like a man who didn’t belong. And he dismisses in a footnote speculation that Robert Harlan, a man of mixed race who grew up as a member of John Harlan’s family, might have been a half brother. Even if he wasn’t in fact related to John, however, it might have mattered if John believed otherwise ... Luxenberg skillfully works the military and the political background into his narrative. Still, despite ample quotations from letters and diaries, the three principals retain a sepia quality. They seem stiff, earnest, florid—Victorian. And there is a lot of biographical backstory. It takes four hundred pages to get to Homer Plessy; the argument and the decision are over after just twenty pages, and then the book abruptly ends. The afterlife of the case gets no real attention ... And it does seem a misjudgment to tell the story of an important civil-rights case as the story of three white men.

Luxenberg’s richly detailed portrait of America’s most turbulent time reveals why the case was such a long shot ... vividly tells the story of how far our country had to go to repudiate its commitments to a racial double standard. A visit to any prison or inner-city public school today reveals how far we still have to go.

...a work of impressive scope, depth and sensitivity ... Acknowledging that he’s 'not a legal scholar or a constitutional historian,' Luxenberg...immerses himself deeply in the extensive documentary record [and] demonstrates both a mastery of those disciplines and a skill at evoking a vivid sense of America's bitter struggles over civil rights in the 19th century ... Reviewing cases from Massachusetts, Michigan and Pennsylvania, Luxenberg thoroughly describes how the practice of separation in public transportation agitated northern lawmakers and courts long before it became an issue in the post-Civil War South ... Anyone who wants to understand Plessy in its own time and in the decades that followed will find Steve Luxenberg’s Separate an ideal starting point.

[Luxenberg] carries it off in style ... Luxenberg brilliantly tackles a difficult task, presenting his solidly researched work clearly and with a restrained objectivity. The racial conflicts and conundrums emerge organically from the colorful stories of each of the principals, with the tragic ending always in view ... An engaging and sensitive exploration of America's detour from the promise of equal protection.

In lucid prose, Luxenberg lays out the history of racialized segregation in the North and South of the United States and offers vivid portraits of main actors in this civil rights struggle ... Some readers may find this exhaustively researched account excessively wordy and too detailed, but Luxenberg provides a useful take on one of the Supreme Court’s most influential decisions.