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Your Learning Zone - The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family
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List Price: $35.00
Our Price: $17.95
Your Save: $ 17.05 ( 49% )
Availability: Usually ships in 24 hours
Manufacturer: W.W. Norton & Co.
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Average Customer Rating:  
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Binding: Hardcover
Dewey Decimal Number: 973.460922
EAN: 9780393064773
ISBN: 0393064778
Label: W.W. Norton & Co.
Manufacturer: W.W. Norton & Co.
Number Of Items: 1
Number Of Pages: 800
Publication Date: 2008-09-17
Publisher: W.W. Norton & Co.
Studio: W.W. Norton & Co.
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Spotlight customer reviews:
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Customer Rating:
Summary: A Fascinating Read
Comment: The Hemmingses of Montecello: An American Family by Annette Gordon-Reed is a fascinating look into the strange black/white family constellations that emerged under the weight slavery during the American Revolutionary period. Providing a glimpse into southern patterns of interracial mixing during 18th and early 19th century, it illimunites the ways in which standard race relation practices differed during the Antebellum and Jim Crow periods of time. These things, taken together with the interesting individual Hemings family stories, made the book hard to put down.
Customer Rating:
Summary: A must-read on race and identity
Comment: 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.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Kindle version overpriced
Comment: One star only because the Kindle version needs to start at $9.99, $17. . . .
Customer Rating:
Summary: A masterful study of the Hemings family
Comment: 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.
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Summary: Most Disappointing and Maddening Book of the Year
Comment: 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.
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Editorial Reviews:
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Historian and legal scholar Annette Gordon-Reed presents this epic work that tells the story of the Hemingses, an American slave family, and their close blood ties to Thomas Jefferson.
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