Gregarious, learned and engagingly open-minded, the book meets America where it is on the subject — which is to say, all over the place … [Clint] skillfully braids interviews with scholarship and personal observation, asking, ‘How different might our country look if all of us fully understood what had happened here?’ … The result is a tour of tours and a reckoning with reckonings, which sketches an impressive and deeply affecting human cartography of America’s historical conscience. The book’s standout quality is the range and sincerity of its encounters … His ease with strangers is charmingly apparent … Never getting lost in his story’s many thickets, Smith confidently interleaves the history of American slavery with his subjects’ varied relationships to the institution’s evolving legacy … Smith has a penchant for evoking people and places, and occasionally garlands his text with descriptions of voices, landscapes and curricula vitae that distract from the substance of his research. His generosity of spirit also leads him to affirm some instances of remembrance that might deserve more scrutiny … But it’s surely a sign of strength when even a book’s shortcomings vindicate its larger project. Smith’s unapologetically subjective map of American memory is an extraordinary contribution to the way we understand ourselves.
How the Word Is Passed: A Reckoning with the History of Slavery Across America
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