Slaves in the Family

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Summary: I found "Slaves in the Family" to be a a truthful book.
Review: Edward Ball's book is wonderful. I do geneology and have been confronted with members of my family who would like certain "secrets" kept hidden. However, I am also a Historic Preservationist. I feel that enough has been hidden about Americas past. I also, have "slaves in my family" and I am part Native American. These two secrets have remained hidden from certain family lines in their geneology charts. I say "why"? We are who we are and so are our ancestors. Lets keep researching and writing. I feel the truth will finally bring people together.

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Summary: Meticulously researched and clearly written
Review: Once I got over the layer upon layer of names and "begats", I found the book to be extremely well-written. The research that went into this is amazing. An excellent book that covers the history of slavery in the U.S.

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Summary: The Sins of the Father
Review: Though a baby boomer, I grew up in the largely unreconstructed South. My great-grandfather had slaves. As children, we visited the ruins of his plantation. My Grandmother and elderly aunts were rabidly racist. We grew up on tales of damned Yankees, uppity you-know-what, thieving white-trash, etc., all in the midst of the civil rights movement. Somewhere my sister and I went wrong. We couldn't swallow all this racist claptrap. It is haunting to think that someone as close as 3 generations away could treat his fellow human beings with such contempt and cruelty. Ball's book seems to me to go a long way towards trying to remedy the sins of the father: throwing ice-water on the pretensions of "Genteel" Southerners who still dream of a way of life that existed for precious few of them, was built on the basest human misery and met its end 130 years ago. Ball's story helps to mitigate my disappointment that Bill Clinton, during his African trip last year, did not get around to apologizing to Africa - something Tony Blair managed to do for Britain's treatment of Ireland. Mary Ritchie [e-mail]

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Summary: "Slaves in the Family" is brilliant.
Review: Edward Ball not only pens an insightful look into a past which has begot the present but does so with a literary genius which causes the reader to keep turning pages. No doubt, he is quite fortunate that his ancestors compiled the records which aided his search. It takes a great deal of courage to confront the misdeeds of our society and to seek out people who might not be receptive to his good intentions. This world needs more bridges such as the author has built.

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Summary: Interesting topic & approach, not well executed though
Review: Good subject & interesting approach, but it reads like an exceptionally, exhaustingly long newspaper article. I thought the book was designed for readers with short attention spans & no taste for scholarly history, however well-written. The book has many scholarly-type facts strewn about its pages, in no particular order & with no particular line of argument. But it doesn't seem to bring any startling new & interesting interpretation to these facts. Not quite clear on why a jury thought this was one of the year's best books. But I though "A Civil Action" was a similar book that received such critical plaudits too.

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Summary: Slavery includes sellers, traders, owners, and owned.
Review: I felt as though I was on a journey with the author. My people came from Ireland in the mid-19th century and I know very little about them. I identified with the humanity of all the dramatis personae in E. Ball's story: owners and slaves alike. I learned a lot about the human condition--of whatever color--and applaud the author's persistance in pursuing his family's paths no matter where they led.

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Summary: Harvard Revisionism At Its Worst
Review: Another classic example of a Southern-born individual pimping out his birthright to Northerners for thirty pieces of silver. The art of letting Northerners gloat about themselves at the expense of Southerners has become rather tiresome, at least it has for the past 130 years. I find it rather queer how Americans in New England & the rest of the North are constantly unwilling to deal with their own racial prejudices, yet have no problem exercising such bigotry against Southerners of all races. If our Northern counterparts truly had no problem confronting their own history as a whole (good & bad), as Southerners do, there would be less racial diviseness in America.

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Summary: History as it should have been taught in school
Review: Although it took me a while to read Slaves in the Family because I had to work at keeping details straight, I found it wonderfully enlightening. I hated history in school because, as it was taught, it seemed irrlevant to the present. As I've grown older, I've seen how integral an understanding of the past is to understanding the present. Mr. Ball gives us this perspective in an honest and uncompromising fashion. This is not a book written to make Souterners feel bad--the English and the Africans share in the shame--but it does help us to understand what this legacy has done to all our lives today. Interviews and reviews that I had heard highlighted the possible intermingling of the white Balls and the black slaves, but that is not what this book is about. Rather than an expose of intermingling, it is a family history of people who often have no history. When he offers families a lineage all the way back to Africa, including the country of origin, I am awed. What a gift of personal history!

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Summary: Wonderful book, for northerners and southerners alike
Review: What a wonderful insight into the southern world that outsiders never see. And it is a fascinating history of African Americans that was not available to me when I was in school. Everyone should read this. Mr. Ball has a light style, although several genelogical facts are repeated far too often. A family tree in the front of the book would have been helpful. I'm looking forward to his next book.

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Summary: The most powerful book I have ever read!
Review: I picked this one up on a whim after seeing it in Time magazine's top ten list. I was mesmerized by the story of the Ball family. The accuracy of and amount of data is a precious commodity for anyone interested in the history of the South. Ball makes no apologies for his ancestors and their behavior; he simply tells us the way it was. The fact that he helped some black families trace their lineage sent chills down my spine as I thought of the cruel circumstances that brought the families together in the first place. I have plans now to further research done by my second cousin to see just what my family history has to say!