Book cover of Life of a Klansman: A Family History in White Supremacy

Book description

"A haunting tapestry of interwoven stories that inform us not just about our past but about the resentment-bred demons that are all too present in our society today . . . The interconnected strands of race and history give Ball’s entrancing stories a Faulknerian resonance." ―Walter Isaacson, The New York…

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Why read it?

1 author picked Life of a Klansman as one of their favorite books. Why do they recommend it?

This is a fitting companion to Ball’s earlier book Slaves in the Family, a meticulous account of his paternal ancestors’ slave-owning history and their biracial progeny.

In this book, Ball, a talented and engaging writer, dives deep into the buried story of a maternal forbearer in New Orleans, Constant Lecorgne, a working-class white creole. With novelistic flair, Ball takes us along with Lecorgne in his peregrinations through Louisiana’s violent and chaotic reactionary politics in the 1860s and 1870s. Ball faced a daunting challenge: to humanize Lecorgne without either sugarcoating his reprehensible behavior or forgiving him for it.

Few books I’ve…

From Fergus' list on the bloody history of Reconstruction.

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The Rosewood Penny by J.S. Fields,

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The dragons of Yuro have been hunted to extinction.

On a small, isolated island, in a reclusive forest, lives bandit leader Marani and her brother Jacks. With their outlaw band they rob from the rich to feed themselves, raiding carriages and dodging the occasional vindictive…

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