"An original, thought-provoking meditation on the corrosive legacy of slavery from the 16th century to the present and a welcome illustration of the powers of innovative scholarship to help us better understand how history shapes identity. But the book is also—this must be stressed—splendidly written, driven by this writer's prodigious narrative gifts. She combines a novelist's eye for telling detail with the blunt, self-aware voice of those young writers who have revived the American coming-of-age story into something more engaging and empathetic than the tales of redemption or of the exemplary life well lived, patterned on Henry Adams, Benjamin Franklin and Frederick Douglass."—Elizabeth Schmidt, The New York Times Book Review