"I can always depend on Eric Rauchway to display the meticulousness of a careful historian with the literary flair of a fine novelist. Blessed Among Nations: How the World Made America adds to this admixture a powerful public voice as well. A tour de force."—Eric Alterman, author of When Presidents Lie: A History of Official Deception and Its Consequences

"The historian and the storyteller in Ms. Satter are never at war with each other. Family Properties is so packed with the horrors visited upon black families in Chicago from the 1940s through the 1970s that you will want to walk outside every 15 pages or so and simply scream in outrage. Yet her tone throughout is dispassionate. She is at heart a historian, not a memoirist. And she is a vertiginously good one. Her book is transfixing from its first sentence . . . the pleasures here are deep and resonant ones. Family Properties feels like something close to an instant classic."—Dwight Garner, The New York Times