Slaves in the Family brought history alive for me...

books:

	• Slaves in the Family (Ballantine Reader's Circle) Edward Ball Ballantine Books, 1998 - 544 pages average customer review:based on 98 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

Peninsula of Lies

Oh my gosh! I didn't realize that Dawn Langley Simmons had passed away. When I purchased her book about the life of Margaret Rutherford, "A Blithe Spirit", I wrote to Dawn, and was surprised to receive a reply from her or him. For several years she/he corresponded and now I realize that she/he may have mis-represented herself. She did send me several photos of Margaret Rutherford. Interesting story.

Slaves in the Family brought history alive for me...

Quite often history textbooks can be dry and boring. Edward Ball's "Slaves in the Family" illuminates many larger historical events -- the slave trade, the institution of slavery, plantation economies, the Revolutionary War, The Civil War, and Emancipation -- and brings these events down to the human level, to the place where flesh and blood people lived through these events, how the events shaped them, and how they in turn contributed to history.

Ball's careful, meticulous research wove oral accounts with written records kept so well by the Ball family, giving a credible, well-balanced view of plantation life, slavery, and how it impacted the lives of both black and white Ball plantation residents.

Ball paid special note to the nuances of each speaker's story as told, not only through their words, but also their body language. He is an astute observer of people's reactions and unspoken thoughts.

I highly recommend this fasinating book. I couldn't lay it down.

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Interesting Read

I thought this was a good read. I especially appreciated the details of the types of Africans that the planters preferred and detested. I recommend this book. Yes, I do agree that the author's writing style was dry. However, I find most books that have a historical base, unless it is fiction, to be dry as cracker.

man enough to do it

Some reviewers below complain that this book is tedious. Well, sure. I bet the US Constitution and the Bible are tedious to someone who has no clue about, or doesn't care about, their context. To anyone with some understanding of US history, the project of writing this book marks a step forward in race relations, however big or small that step may turn out to be. If you care even a little about why this country is the way it is, this book crackles with a searing flame.

Ball writes about visiting a wary African American man in Chapter 6, and what that man says at the end of his interview speaks for me and my opinion of the book. "Someone has to break the ice. I gotta give you credit, you were man enough to do it."

People won't agree whether reconciliation or forgiveness apply in this situation, and I'm not sure either. But this is the author's best effort at telling the objective truth about black-white relations as it was lived by individuals over the centuries. "I decided I would make an effort, however inadequate and personal, to face the plantations, to reckon with them rather than ignore their realities or make excuses for them."

Chapter 9 describes the shocking child mortality figures on the plantations. And on a slave voyage from Africa to Charleston, over a third of the captive passengers died en route - just the cost of doing business to the owners. No wonder some try to deny this history; it's too painful. Yet, the book also provides some episodes of humanity and hope. Readers will emerge with a greater understanding of our history and human nature. Maybe they'll become more vigilant against trespasses on human life and dignity in our own day as well.

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History Made Real

Edward Ball made a courageous journey into his family's past when he researched and wrote this book about their slave owning history, and took the step of searching out and meeting descendants of their slaves. This paperback edition includes an insightful follow-up exchange between the author and one of his black relatives about the writing of the book, their relationship, and how their views of race relations have and have not changed since its writing. The book inspired me both to think deeply about my attitude towards race and to read more about southern history, using the prism of slave ownership and my own family's southern geneaology as a focus. Related recommendations: The Ruling Race: A History of American Slaveholders] and [ASIN:0465015557 My Confederate Kinfolk

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reviews: page 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10

NATIONAL BESTSELLER

"[A] LANDMARK BOOK."

--San Francisco Chronicle

"POWERFUL."

--The New York Times Book Review

"GRIPPING."

--The Boston Sunday Globe

"BRILLIANT."

--The New Yorker

"EVERYONE SHOULD READ AND LEARN FROM THIS LUMINOUS BOOK...Like Alex Haley's Roots, through which African American history came into national focus...Slaves in the Family has the potential for creating a perceptual shift in the American mind...The book is not only honest in its scrupulous reporting but also personal narrative at its finest."

--San Francisco Chronicle

"BALL IS A FIRST-RATE SCHOLAR-JOURNALIST...He's also a good detective, tracking down the many descendants of Ball slaves from New York to California and back in the South and coaxing them, often with some difficulty, to tell their stories...Outside Faulkner, it will be hard to find a more poignant, powerful account of a white man struggling with his and his nation's past."

--The Atlanta Journal-Constitution

"A MASTERPIECE...REMARKABLE...It is a work about slaves in the family. But it is also a large omnium gatherum of enchanting fireside anecdotes, secrets teased out of reluctant fragments from the remote past, the real lives of blacks and whites whose stories had been lost in the disintegrating churn of time until Edward Ball's patient reconstructions."

--The Raleigh News & Observer

"A TOUR DE FORCE...The heart of this remarkable book consists of his sleuthing--tracking down and interviewing the descendants of former Ball slaves across the country... Part oral history, this unique family saga is a catharsis and a searching inventory of racially divided American society."

--Publishers Weekly (starred and boxed review)

"A PAGEANTRY OF PASSIONS AND STRUGGLES."

--African Sun Times

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