![]() ![]() ![]() Slogging my way through its 667 pages, I was reminded of high school English class and my frustration with the exasperating wordiness of Nathaniel Hawthorne or Herman Melville. It's a worthy idea, but one wishes that counselor Reed would tighten up the prose and move along to the closing argument. Rather than analyze the issue through the lens of Jefferson, Reed (a respected African American historian and legal professor) opts to approach her subject from the perspective of the Hemings family - the enslaved clan whose lives and fortunes were inextricably bound to Jefferson and Monticello. Reed's book deals with Thomas Jefferson and the sin of slavery which, in-and-of-itself, is nothing new. Heavy handed and overly long, Annette Gordon-Reed's Pulitzer Prize winning, The Hemingses of Monticello, is a chore to read - which is probably why it won the Pulitzer Prize in the first place. ![]()
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