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Jonna Mendez sums up her extraordinary 25 years at the CIA thusly: “It was a career I loved. I was doing work that mattered, work that made a difference—making history in some small way. It wasn’t a path I’d ever imagined for myself. I was, after all, just a girl from Wichita, Kansas, seeking adventure, never dreaming that would translate into a life that was both covert and trailblazing.”

But it was not easy. She tells her engaging and enlightening story of service, primarily during the Cold War years, in In True Face: A Woman’s Life in the CIA, Unmasked. The challenges of the work itself were great. And although against official policy, misogyny was the way of life in the agency, and Mendez’s experience with gender discrimination provides a look into that environment. CIA historian and journalist Tim Weiner wrote that “apart from the Marines, there is no branch of service in the United States government as hostile to women as the clandestine services of the CIA.” Despite the efforts of some men who went out of their way to undermine Mendez, she showed courage and fortitude, and, in time, she found male allies who were helpful and supportive.

Beginning as a secretary for her CIA agent husband, Mendez rose through the ranks of the organization. Her skills with photography and disguise eventually led to extremely important roles, including Chief of Disguise, in operations around the world. In True Face includes fascinating accounts of the wide range of her activities. She trained couples, usually married, for work as agents in Moscow; disguised a prime minister; and “match[ed] wits” with Russia’s KGB, East Germany’s Stasi, and Chinese and Cuban intelligence. Mendez, in disguise, even visited the White House to meet with President George H.W. Bush.

This consistently absorbing book is a wonderful memoir that offers more than simply a compelling life story. Mendez says discussions with other women in the early stages of the project convinced her that her experiences should be understood “in the larger context of women in the CIA and indeed, women in the American workplace.” So we have “two stories—one in the world of espionage, the other in the world of women.” And both of them are very well told.

In True Face recounts Jonna Mendez’s experience rising through the ranks of the CIA, from disguising spies and planning special operations to grappling with gender discrimination.
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As a 19-year-old undergraduate, Antonia Hylton read an academic paper that mentioned Crownsville State Hospital, known at its founding as the Hospital for the Negro Insane. That reference triggered an obsession with the hospital’s bleak history that has carried her through the 10 years it took to produce Madness: Race and Insanity in a Jim Crow Asylum. Hylton brings both her journalistic talent and a deep, personal engagement to something she unabashedly describes as a “passion project.” In it, she recounts the 93-year life of Crownsville, tying that painful history to the story of the treatment of mental illness in the United States, especially in communities of color, and to her own family’s experiences with mental health.

Speaking via video from a conference room at NBC headquarters in New York City, Hylton brims with energy and enthusiasm. “If I could understand everything there was to know about Crownsville,” she says, “I would understand my family and my country better.” In her mind, “doing this would be cathartic; it would help me have conversations or fill in blanks that I was struggling to fill in otherwise.”

Hylton calls her book a “tribute to oral history,” and the more than 40 interviews she conducted with former staff and patients—some of them in their 80s or older—and her own family members deeply enrich the story. “This book came to life because of the stories people shared with me,” she says.

One of the greatest challenges in collecting those stories was gaining access to the patients, many of them deeply traumatized by their experiences at Crownsville. “To find patients who were ready to go on the record comfortably was an incredible challenge,” Hylton says, “and it took a lot of trust-building and community outreach. I really had to accept that it was going to be a one-person-at-a-time kind of thing.”

“In addition to putting years of reporting on the page, I put my heart out there.”

Thankfully, there are few people better prepared for this specific kind of work than Hylton. In less than a decade following her graduation from Harvard University, Hylton has already accumulated an impressive set of professional credentials and honors, including Emmy and Peabody awards. After several years as a correspondent and producer for VICE Media, she joined NBC News and MSNBC, where she works as a correspondent on stories at the intersection of politics, education and civil rights.

Book jacket image for Madness by Antonia HyltonBeginning in 2014, she spent long hours in the Maryland State Archives combing through Crownsville’s files, woefully incomplete thanks to shoddy record keeping and the destruction of decades of documents by the state. The paucity of documents would have been far worse had it not been for the efforts of Paul Lurz, a longtime Crownsville staff member who served as an unofficial preservationist. Hylton acknowledges feeling “really angry” that “no one had thought to dignify or track this information in the first place.”

Hylton follows the history of the hospital from its inception in 1911, when 12 Black men were transported to rural Maryland to begin constructing the facility that eventually would house them as its patients, to its closure in 2004. It’s a story of an institution where treatment was often crude and callous, though there were, at times, some who tried to treat their patients with humanity. Most notable among the latter was Jacob Morgenstern, a Holocaust survivor who became Crownsville’s superintendent in 1947, and who recruited a group of fellow survivors to serve as staff.

It’s hard not to read Madness without a mingled sense of anger and sadness, as Hylton patiently chronicles the decades when Black patients received substandard care in an overcrowded, understaffed hospital that deemed them less worthy of quality treatment than Maryland’s white mentally ill, even using some patients as subjects in scientific studies without their consent. The hospital was not desegregated until 1963, but in the ’60s and ’70s, as the approach to treating mental illness focused on shifting patients from large institutions like Crownsville to community mental health centers, its former patients were released into the population without access to the resources they needed to make that transition successfully.

Hylton says that what kept driving her to tell Crownsville’s anguished history was the door it opened into her own family’s painful past. She twines an institutional story with a deeply personal one, unearthing the stories of her cousin Maynard and great-grandfather Clarence, whose lives were tragically impacted by mental illness and then largely written out of her family’s history. “I’m going to resurrect Maynard and Clarence,” she says. “I’m going to give their lives some dignity. I’m going to give their struggles some context that wasn’t there decades ago.” Indeed, Hylton reveals, excavating these stories encouraged some family members to seek therapy to heal their own psychological wounds.

Read our starred review of Madness by Antonia Hylton.

The Maryland legislature has appropriated an initial $30 million for Anne Arundel County to turn the hospital grounds into a memorial, park and museum. Local historian and community organizer Janice Hayes-Williams has created an annual service she calls “Say My Name” at the site, to recall the some 1,700 patients buried there.

Hylton brings Madness to a moving climax with a scene she says “just poured out of me,” describing the 2022 commemoration at the onsite cemetery. On an April morning, she followed in the steps of community elders, clutching multicolored rose petals and a piece of paper bearing the name of Frances Clayton, a woman from Baltimore who died at Crownsville in 1924 at age 41. Kneeling down to place the petals on the ground, Hylton pressed her palm to the ground “to feel the pulse of the earth.” She writes that at that moment, she thought, “They’ve been waiting for us.”

“If I can inspire even just one family to have some of the conversations my family has been able to have as a result of this reporting, that’s what I want,” she says. The responses of some of her early readers “have already made me feel very whole, even with a story that is heartbreaking. In addition to putting years of reporting on the page, I put my heart out there.”

Photo of Antonia Hylton by Mark Clennon.

The Emmy Award-winning journalist chronicles the decades-long history of Crownsville State Hospital, where patients lived in prisonlike conditions.
STARRED REVIEW

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Beloved and buzzy authors such as Tia Williams, Francis Spufford and Katherine Arden took new and exciting directions in February!
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Almost from the moment it docked in Mobile Bay, Alabama, much has been written about the Clotilda, the schooner that brought 110 captive Africans to the U.S. in 1860, more than five decades after the slave trade had been outlawed. The illegal voyage was conducted with stealth, but the arrival of the ship was an open secret that drew international headlines, though no punishment for the wealthy enslavers responsible. Interest in “the last slave ship” gradually waned until the late 2010s, when the search for (and eventual discovery of) the ship’s wreckage spurred a new cycle of research and media interest, including the first publication of Zora Neale Hurston’s 1920s interviews with survivor Kossula Lewis.

Historian Hannah Durkin’s considerable scholarship draws on these sources and others in The Survivors of the Clotilda: The Lost Stories of the Last Captives of the American Slave Trade. She cuts through the myths around this notorious story while keeping a tight focus on the 103 surviving young adults and children, whose lives were forever changed by displacement, family separation and enslavement.  

Durkin has a Ph.D. in American Studies from the University of Nottingham and has long focused on the history of transatlantic slavery. In 2020, her research revealed that the last living survivor was not Lewis, as previously thought, but Matilda McCrear, who was just 2 years old when she, her mother and five siblings were kidnapped from their West African village. Matilda, her mother and sisters ended up on the Clotilda; she never saw her two brothers again. 

That is just one of many painful moments for the survivors, who endured five years of enslavement. After the Civil War, they requested repatriation to Benin, to no avail. Though they mourned their homeland, they found ways to carry on their language and traditions. Some founded Africatown, a community on the outskirts of Mobile that became a thriving all-Black enclave. Others ended up elsewhere in the Black Belt, including Gee’s Bend, a famous wellspring of quilting art that draws heavily from West African influences. 

Because it tells the stories of so many people in so much detail, The Survivors of the Clotilda is dense and can lack a clear narrative thread. Yet this multitude of stories allows readers to see a variety of reactions to and experiences of enslavement, turning the Clotilda survivors into a microcosm of the nearly 13 million Africans who were kidnapped during the transatlantic slave trade. This authoritative work will be appreciated by anyone looking for a comprehensive account of one of history’s most infamous moments.

Hannah Durkin’s authoritative The Survivors of the Clotilda cuts through the myths around the notorious last slave ship to dock in the United States.

Like his mentor Martin Luther King Jr., John Lewis had a dream. Amid the turmoil and violence of a segregated South and a nation embroiled in the struggle for racial reconciliation, Lewis envisioned and championed what he called a “Beloved Community” in America, “a society based on simple justice that values the dignity and the worth of every human being.” In his captivating John Lewis: In Search of Beloved Community, Raymond Arsenault narrates the mesmerizing story of Lewis’ evolution from a Civil Rights activist to an eminent congressman who never lost sight of his vision for a just and equitable society.

Drawing on archival materials and interviews with Lewis and his friends, family and associates, Arsenault traces Lewis from his childhood in Troy, Alabama, where he daily witnessed the indignities and violence of racial segregation. Steeled and inspired by the Montgomery Bus Boycott, he entered American Baptist Theological Seminary in Nashville, Tennessee, and began his storied activism in earnest. Lewis and his contemporaries incorporated the principles of rightness and righteousness—what their teacher James Lawson called “soul force”—with methods of nonviolent resistance. Arsenault documents Lewis’ participation in the Freedom Rides, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, the Selma to Montgomery marches and his advocacy for the Voting Rights Act. After King’s 1968 assassination, Lewis’ optimism turned to despair; he had a feeling, Arsenault writes, that “maybe, just maybe, we would not overcome.” 

But that didn’t last. Elected to Congress in 1986, Lewis went to Washington with a legacy to uphold and a commitment to carry on the spirit, goals and principles of nonviolence and social action. He was always disillusioned by self-serving politicians and their infighting, and he devoted his career to building coalitions among opponents. In a 2020 speech, Lewis uttered the remarks that cemented his legacy: “We cannot give up now. We cannot give in. . . . Go out there, speak up, speak out, get in the way. Get in good trouble, necessary trouble.”

With John Lewis Arsenault offers the first comprehensive biography of the icon and serves as a fitting bookend to Lewis’ own autobiography, Walking With the Wind. The work provides an inspiring portrait of a man whose vision and moral courage propelled him to share his belief in the Beloved Community and inspire generations. 

Raymond Arsenault’s mesmerizing biography of John Lewis chronicles the life of the Civil Rights icon and congressman whose vision of a just and equitable society has inspired generations.

In telling the story of Maryland’s Crownsville Hospital, Emmy Award-winning NBC News correspondent Antonia Hylton illuminates a troubling chapter in America’s treatment of its Black citizens. Readers of Madness: Race and Insanity in a Jim Crow Asylum will come away from Hylton’s disquieting book with a keen knowledge of our country’s profound historical failings in mental health care, as well as the persistence of these failings when they are compounded with racism today.

In March 1911, 12 Black men were delivered to a forest in rural Maryland just northwest of the city of Annapolis. For the next three years, their task was to construct the asylum that would house them, then called the State Hospital for the Negro Insane. At the hospital’s height in the mid-20th century, some 2,700 patients, including children, lived in “prisonlike conditions,” overcrowded and understaffed, at times with “one doctor per 225 patients.” Hylton traces the history of Crownsville over 93 years until its closure in 2004, revealing that even as some of its leaders strove to implement more humane policies, the hospital’s fundamental flaws persisted.

Hylton began work on the project that became this book a decade ago while a student at Harvard University. In 2014, she first accessed records stored in the Maryland State Archives, but these only partially revealed Crownsville’s dismal history—any records dating before 1960 were allegedly destroyed. To supplement her extensive archival research, she relied on reporting from Black-owned publications and conducted more than 40 interviews. Among her most fruitful conversations were ones with Paul Lurz, a former chief of social services who became an unofficial records preservationist, especially as the institution approached its final days; and Sonia King, a onetime patient who finished her education after her recovery and returned to Crownsville as a therapeutic recreation specialist.

In Hylton’s author’s note, she is candid about her inspiration for this research: Her own family history of mental illness motivated her to uncover where racial injustice and mental illness intersect. She interviewed family members in the process, writing, “I wanted to model the kind of self-exploration and judgment-free discussion that I hope my book inspires in others.”

Hylton’s account of the mistreatment of generations of Black patients at Crownsville and the callous approach of many caregivers and public officials makes for painful, but essential, reading. Madness is an unsparing reckoning with a fraught past and a clear-eyed call for a more responsible, compassionate future.

Read our interview with Antonia Hylton.

Antonia Hylton’s Madness offers an unsparing reckoning with history as it excavates an infamous mental hospital for Black patients.
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Ilyon Woo’s Master Slave Husband Wife: An Epic Journey from Slavery to Freedom tells the story of Ellen and William Craft, an enslaved husband and wife who—thanks to a courageous plan—fled Georgia in 1848. Ellen disguised herself as a white enslaver, while William pretended to be her captive, and together, they traveled to the Northern free states while successfully evading the authorities. News of their escape made them famous even as they faced new obstacles. Thoroughly researched and beautifully executed, Woo’s narrative explores themes of loyalty, courage and identity, making it a rewarding pick for book clubs.

Gateway to Freedom: The Hidden History of the Underground Railroad by Pulitzer Prize winner Eric Foner traces the development of the antislavery movement in the early 1800s, especially in New York City, which gave rise to the underground railroad—the secret system that allowed scores of enslaved people to escape the South prior to the Civil War. Foner writes with authority and an eye for detail. Drawing upon new source materials, he documents the efforts of underground railroad agents, courageous abolitionists and determined freedom seekers to provide a revelatory look at a seminal chapter in American history.  

In Be Free or Die: The Amazing Story of Robert Smalls’ Escape from Slavery to Union Hero, journalist Cate Lineberry chronicles the extraordinary achievements of Robert Smalls. In 1862, Smalls, an enslaved man in South Carolina, took over a Confederate ship in Charleston Harbor, secretly brought his family members aboard and delivered the boat to Union forces, thereby securing their release from slavery. Smalls later participated in naval actions and went on to serve in the House of Representatives. Lineberry pays tribute to a remarkable leader in this meticulous account of Smalls’ life.

Andrew Delbanco’s The War Before the War: Fugitive Slaves and the Struggle for America’s Soul from the Revolution to the Civil War assesses the rise of slavery and the rift it caused across the nation, demonstrating that freedom seekers were instrumental in bringing attention to the horrors of the institution. Delbanco looks at watershed moments, like the passage of the Fugitive Slave Act in 1850, offering fresh perspectives on how they affected the country. Reading groups can dig into rich discussion topics like the notion of justice and slavery’s lasting impact on society.

Commemorate Black History Month with these odes to freedom.
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Winston Churchill’s close ties with the United States began with his mother, Jennie Jerome, who at age 20 married Lord Randolph Churchill. As an author and prominent public figure, Winston developed an extraordinary relationship with the United States, and a keen interest in the Civil War. Over the years he had two basic goals related to the U.S. First, he believed it was in Britain’s national interest for the two countries, with their shared purposes and similar concerns, to stay close. The second was personal. He lived extravagantly and was always looking for ways to expand his resources. His books were published and reviewed in the U.S. and he was paid well for his lectures and magazine and newspaper work. Like his mother, who had used her influence to advance his early career, he became a world-class networker himself as he met American leaders.

How this developed is the subject of Cita Stelzer’s fascinating Churchill’s American Network: Winston Churchill and the Forging of the Special Relationship. In Churchill’s age, the public got the news from newspapers and magazines. Stelzer’s research largely is sourced from “rich and relatively underutilized” local and national press reports of Churchill’s U.S. visits—ranging from where he went and with whom, to local responses at his public lectures, his humorous quips, what he ate for lunch and how he found his accommodations. Stelzer brings to life a cast of characters Churchill brought into his network, among them media giant William Randolph Hearst, actor and director Charlie Chaplin, journalist Edward R. Murrow, steel magnate Charles M. Schwab and socialite and suffragist Daisy Harriman.

While Stelzer does not claim Churchill single-handedly influenced Roosevelt’s decision to come to Britain’s aid during World War II, she makes clear that his relationships with American politicians and leading thinkers “were a helpful offset to the noninterventionist and isolationist, even pro-German background of public opinion.” Churchill’s network “reenforced the favorable view of Britain,” Stelzer writes, “and enlisted others in support of his view that the Anglo-American alliance . . . was key to a stable, prosperous, and peaceful world.”

Stelzer’s scholarship on Churchill has been highly praised: 2019’s Working With Winston explores the world of Churchill’s secretaries, and 2013’s Dinner With Churchill focuses on the prime minister’s dinner table diplomacy. Churchill’s American Network is another enlightening look at the statesman, one with an even broader scope.

Cita Stelzer’s enlightening Churchill’s American Network explores the statesman’s nexus of influencers in a country he loved.
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Edda L. Fields-Black’s extraordinary Combee: Harriet Tubman, the Combahee River Raid, and Black Freedom During the Civil War will not be for every reader. It is long and very detailed. Reading it is sometimes like watching the slow, painstaking process of an archaeological dig—but readers who stick with the book will come away satisfied by Fields-Black’s patient unearthing.

The event at the center of her excavation is the June 20, 1863, Combahee River Raid. During that pre-dawn attack, 300 Black Union soldiers torched seven South Carolina rice plantations along a 15-mile stretch of the river, causing millions of dollars of damage to crops and property and striking “fear into the heart of the rebellion.” Their guide was Harriet Tubman—today known around the world for her work in the Underground Railroad, but less so for her courageous military history. With Tubman acting as intermediary, 746 men, women and children fled to the river’s edge and boarded the Union boats to escape slavery. The raid served notice that Black men—both formerly enslaved and free—could become effective, disciplined Union soldiers.

These events have been narrated elsewhere, but never with such a passion for factual depth and precision. Combee is often revelatory. The author of Deep Roots: Rice Farmers in West Africa and the African Diaspora, Fields-Black conveys that the South Carolina rice economy was essential to the Confederacy and involved remarkable feats of technology and engineering, much of them performed by enslaved people taken from rice growing regions of Africa. Fields-Black’s approach to the Combahee River Raid also provides insight into the remarkable abilities of Tubman to communicate across linguistic and cultural barriers and to move stealthily through the South unnoticed.

Prior to this account, many of these freedom seekers had been lost to history. Most, like Tubman, were illiterate and did not record their experiences; plantation records were destroyed in the raid. Through herculean research and cross-referencing of land, bank, U.S. Army pension and slavery transaction records, Fields-Black is able to name names (including her great-great-great grandfather Hector Fields) and offer readers a sense of who these people were and what their lives were like. Combee holds many additional revelatory threads and insights within its depths, but this act of resurrection alone makes the book profoundly important.

Edda L. Fields-Black’s revelatory Combee narrates the 1863 Combahee River Raid, in which Harriet Tubman led Black soldiers to liberate more than 700 enslaved people.
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Dissent has played a defining role in the history of the United States. The Declaration of Independence and the Constitution established guides to governance, but it is often dissent, sometimes over many years of struggle, that has brought the principles of those writings into concrete fruition. Temple University historian Ralph Young gives us a meticulously researched and beautifully written overview of the many kinds of dissent in American Patriots: A Short History of Dissent.

Following a meaty exploration of early examples—such as the development of the colonial era’s principles of freedom of the press and the separation of church and state, and Henry David Thoreau’s “Resistance to Civil Government”—Young focuses on the last 100 years or so. During that time, new technologies increasingly enabled dissenters to advance their causes more efficiently and to more people. Women’s rights, civil rights, workers’ rights, antiwar movements and more are highlighted in some detail.

Young discusses the difference between genuine dissent and synthetic dissent. Of the January 6 insurrection, when supporters of Donald Trump invaded the U.S. Capitol claiming that the presidential election had been stolen, he writes, “Dissenters have legitimate grievances against the dominant power structure. True dissent is based upon expressing truth and exposing injustice.” The members of the mob, he posits, were “pawns of a charismatic demagogue who were short-circuited by conspiracy theories and disinformation.” True dissenters want to bring reform from within the system—not to crush it, as terrorists and revolutionaries do, Young argues. True dissent is a deeply patriotic effort to get the country to live up to its highest ideals. In the book’s conclusion, Young quotes Dwight D. Eisenhower: “We must never confuse honest dissent with disloyal subversion.”

Dissent can be complex, whether the category is political, economic, religious, social or cultural, or an overlapping of causes. World War II is a good example of the last. As Young writes, “Although most Americans supported the ‘Good War,’ many thousands protested against the war, against the draft, and against infringements on civil liberties and civil rights.”

Martin Luther King Jr. said that “the great glory of American democracy is the right to protest for right.” This wide-ranging and enlightening book illustrates the crucial truth of that statement.

In the meticulously researched and enlightening American Patriots, Ralph Young illustrates the crucial role of dissent in our democracy.
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In the past two decades, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints—widely known as the Mormon church—has relaxed its iron grip on its archives, allowing some historians to conduct research in its vast library. Professor of religious history Benjamin E. Park has availed himself of this new access and of the work of other contemporary historians to write an absorbing history of the church and its culture. American Zion: A New History of Mormonism argues that Mormon history is surprisingly complex, and its evolution mirrors the struggles of American society. 

Mormons were, from the outset, outsiders. They interpreted the Constitution’s protection of freedom of religion as extending to the practice of polygamy; this belief did them no favors as they sought a home. They were dispelled from state to state as zealots, sometimes through violence—their founder, Joseph Smith, was murdered by a mob in Illinois. Escaping to the Utah desert, they were beset by the federal government, which refused to let them form a “State of the Desert” unless they renounced polygamy. Wary, they zealously guarded their records, putting their own spin on their history. In this century, they allied with the religious right and the Republican Party in culture wars and more fully entered the American mainstream, even producing a formidable presidential candidate, Mitt Romney.

American Zion presents an engaging account of the personalities that loom large in the religion, especially Smith and the church’s second president, Brigham Young. But Park also shows how events and attitudes outside the church have divided the faith. He traces its complicated history of racial bias; its misogyny and, fascinatingly, history of feminism among early Mormon women; its stance on LGBTQ+ rights; and how a church still governed largely by elderly white American men is faring as its membership grows internationally. 

Park, a Mormon himself, tells the story from the inside with neutrality; while he’s critical of the faith’s leaders, he has no ax to grind. If you’re looking for a more dramatic treatment, a la Jon Krakauer’s The Banner of Heaven and its ensuing television series, American Zion may not be for you. But if you’re a curious, measured reader, you’ll likely agree with the author that “Mormonism is a deep well.”

Benjamin E. Park’s absorbing history of Mormonism, American Zion, effectively argues that the faith’s evolution mirrors the struggle of American society.
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Dr. Deborah Plant is an independent scholar of African American Literature and Africana Studies and a former Africana and English professor at the University of South Florida. She is an expert on the life and works of Zora Neale Hurston and edited Baracoon, Hurston’s posthumously published account of the last survivor of the transatlantic slave trade. She is not, however, a historian.

Yet Plant’s latest book, Of Greed and Glory: In Pursuit of Freedom of All is in large part a work of historical nonfiction. In it, she explores how the wording of the 13th Amendment set the stage for the incarceration of millions of African Americans, who in turn provided unpaid labor that enriched their captors. Intended to prohibit slavery, the 13th Amendment exempts “the duly convicted” from its protections, that is, those who have been convicted of a crime. Plant establishes a direct line from this loophole through the Black Codes and Jim Crow laws to today’s mass incarceration, which disproportionately imprisons Black people. In other words, far from prohibiting slavery, the 13th Amendment enabled it to continue under the color of law.

While Of Greed and Glory is grounded in historical fact, it is not a history. Instead, it is a deeply subjective book, drenched with the sorrow and rage Plant feels about her brother’s unjust lifetime sentence for rape he did not commit. Most historians avoid subjectivity, but here, subjectivity is the point. The inhumanity and degradation resulting from the exploitation of the “duly convicted” clause results in the objectification of wide swaths of the population. By sharing her brother’s experience, Plant asserts that he and others like him have the right to be the autonomous sovereigns of their own lives, and not the anonymous targets of an unjust system.

This is an emotional and passionate book, raw in its grief and anger, but also imbued with hope for redemption. Based on objective historical fact and subjective experience, Of Greed and Glory has the power of a sermon and the urgency of a manifesto.

Deborah G. Plant’s indictment of America’s criminal justice system, Of Greed and Glory, has the power of a sermon and the urgency of a manifesto.
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Far more than simply “‘The Birds,’ but with owls,” The Parliament is the kind of captivating novel that comes along all too rarely.

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Jami Attenberg’s guide to writing, Derek B. Miller’s World War II art heist and Abbott Kahler’s thriller debut are among January’s top reads.

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