Book description
Read Martha A. Sandweiss's posts on the Penguin Blog
The secret double life of the man who mapped the American West, and the woman he loved
Clarence King was a late nineteenth-century celebrity, a brilliant scientist and explorer once described by Secretary of State John Hay as "the best and…
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Why read it?
1 author picked Passing Strange as one of their favorite books. Why do they recommend it?
"Passing Strange" is the true story of Clarence King, a nineteenth-century American explorer and surveyor and his Black common-law wife, Ada Copeland, who knew him as James Todd. King persuaded Copeland that he was a Black man who passed as white, when in fact the reverse was true, and lived a double life until telling her the truth on his deathbed when he passed in 1901. Copeland outlived King for more than 62 years, dying at age 103 in 1964. Though Copeland left few records behind of her thoughts during her long life and the betrayal that shaped it, Sandweiss…
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