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A must-read on race and identity

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This book helps us rethink our past and remember what we have forgotten. America is a racially mixed country because of slavery and its legacy. Now we know definitively that Thomas Jefferson and Annette Hemings had a relationship--one that was tragic but also beautiful. The author takes the history of an interracial relationship out of the shadows and tells it with vivid detail. It opens up a new way of thinking about America's founding fathers--and mothers.

Kindle version overpriced	Customer Rating:
One star only because the Kindle version needs to start at $9.99, $17. . . .

A masterful study of the Hemings family

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Annette Gordon-Reed has written a captivating piece of history about the Hemings family, about the way they were inexorably intertwined with the Jeffersons well before the Sally story, about the feel of what it meant for slaves like the Hemingses to live in Virginia and in other places like Paris and Philadelphia. For me, the most interesting aspect of the book is the story of Sally's brother, James. What abilities he had, what a rich life he led by the standards of his time, what a right arm he was for Jefferson, what a conflict of identity he shouldered, and what tragedy and mystery defined the end of his life! The author has shed light on so much about the story of the two families, but another interesting aspect made crystal clear by her book as well, is to have to learn and accept what we do not know, what we will never know, such as James's death, in other words, what is lost to history about that and so much else concerning slavery and the Founding Fathers.

Most Disappointing and Maddening Book of the Year

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I bought this book out of an interest in the subject matter and relying on the impressive credentials of its author. I anticipated that this would be an actual history that would bring many primary source materials together to paint a cohesive picture of the "Hemingses of Monticello." As Gordon-Reed expressly states, Sally Hemings is a cipher, since there is so little epistolary or other primary source material extant to flesh out her presence in the narrative. Gordon-Reed seems to believe that that gives her unlimited license to project whatever thoughts, experiences, and motivations she likes upon someone who is very close to a blank page in history. It is unfair that Sally Hemings is very nearly a blank page--which injustice is not rectified by essentially inventing a persona and events for her life out of the author's imagination and suppositions. The grossest disservice of all is Gordon-Reed's supposition that Sally Hemings was defined entirely by her enslavement, despite considerable evidence to the contrary. Human beings, even enslaved ones, are more than the sum of their circumstances. Gordon-Reed herself discusses the dangers of speculation about and projecting modern values upon historical subjects--and then disingenuously proceeds to do just that. Concerning both the Hemingses and Jeffersons et al, this book is full of outrageously broad generalizations, wild speculation, and leaps of imagination made and taken from the historical and moral perspective of a modern academic. One would expect more rigorous intellectual discipline from any author who purports to interpret history. No one who picks up this book is likely to need convincing of the horrors of slavery--or even of 18th-century white male European patriarchy--but Gordon-Reed spends the better part of 700 pages bending others' scholarship to serve an agenda which admits of no historical context for, or alternative understandings of, actual facts. Gordon-Reed is welcome to an agenda, but it isn't history. Since I am one of those who cannot stop reading a book--any book--before the end, I have spent the better part of the last 24 hours seething over "The Hemingses of Monticello" and what I consider to be false marketing of this work. Evidently I will have to track down and read the materials cited in the bibliography to get real information on the subject.

The Hemingses of Monticello

Customer Rating:

The flaws first: This is a very long book, weighing in at over 600 pages, which could and should have been tighter and shorter. The lack of conciseness is related to the plodding, clunky, academic style, and the writing is sometimes painfully repetitive. There are occasional speculative leaps that are perhaps not justified, and a fuller explanation of the DNA evidence would have been most helpful. But: This is a first-class work of research and interpretation which should not be missed by anyone struggling to understand the place of race and slavery in our national history. Ms. Gordon-Reed is remarkably even-handed, compassionate even, with Thomas Jefferson, who was his own best example of his belief that slave holding damages the slave holder as well as the slave. She lets his behavior, and often his own words, reveal his story. And she provides remarkable detail about the lives of Sally and the complicated family of relatives with whom she shared life at Monticello. No matter what one believes about the relationship between Jefferson and Sally Hemings--and we may never know what that was, certainly not in any emotional sense--this volume offers a rich examination of slavery in late 18th and early 19th century Virginia centered on the lives of one family in which black and white intermingled with poignant results. Well worth the slog.