The Known World is an unconventional book, the oddest facet for me being the lack of a main character. Henry Townsend serves as a sort of focal point, but he dies at the beginning of the novel; equally important are his wife Caldonia, parents Augustus and Mildred, the overseer Moses, the slaves Elia...
Listened to this on audio and it was hard to keep track of all the characters and the time periods. Perhaps reading the book would have made this easier. I went through a period when I couldn't read enough or learn enough about the period of slavery in our country. Now I tend to find the subject ...
Slavery is an abhorrent reality that is hard to imagine being more despicable than what most of us have already learned about the "peculiar institution." Edward Jones throws a new twist at us when he writes a book about a slave-owning black man. Indeed, there are instances in which this did occur, b...
I thought this one was just OK. There were a ton of characters and with the hoping back and forth in time I found it a rather difficult read. There were to many characters for any of them to be developed enough and in consequence I didn't really care what happened to any of them. It is a shame reall...
This novel is about the rare slave owners of pre civil war America who were themselves black. While the concept of the book is highly unique, overall I wasn't thrilled with the style. However, the concept alone kept me at it and I enjoyed the tale. If nothing else it made me want to research this sm...
This tells the tale of black slave owners in the pre-Civil War south. It is an ensemble cast of characters, beautifully drawn in rich language and told with respectful remembrance. The tale jumps back and forth in time, so we know ahead the fate of some, but not all the main characters. The endings,...
Just briefly, this is a beautiful novel. It's poignant, wise, and taught me a great deal about a phenomenon I knew nothing about: black slave owners in the South before the Civil War. The issues of social relations between whites, free blacks (with and without slaves), and slaves, and the issues of ...
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