These are excerpts from two reviews of "Slavery by Another Name" —- one from the New York Times Book Review, and one that ran in AJC's Arts & Books section last Sunday.

(ENLARGE)

From the Times' Janet Maslin:

Author Douglas A. Blackmon eviscerates one of our schoolchildren's most basic assumptions: that slavery in America ended with the Civil War. Blackmon unearths shocking evidence that the practice persisted well into the 20th century. [Maslin complains that the book starts slowly, speculating about an enslaved man about whom few records exist.]

But as soon as it gets to more verifiable material, "Slavery by Another Name" becomes relentless and fascinating. It exposes what has been a mostly unexplored aspect of American history (though there have been dissertations and a few books from academic presses). It creates a broad racial, economic, cultural and political backdrop for events that have haunted Mr. Blackmon and will now haunt us all. And it need not exaggerate the hellish details of intense racial strife.

The torment that Mr. Blackmon catalogs is, if anything, understated here. But it loudly and stunningly speaks for itself.

>>>

From Steve Suitts, for the Journal-Constitution:

The genius of Blackmon's book is that it illuminates both the real human tragedy and the profoundly corrupting nature of the Old South slavery as it transformed to establish a New South social order.

The book, nonetheless, suffers occasionally from more ambitions than it can deliver. In portraying legal enslavement through personal stories, the book jumps a little too much from place to place, story to story, back and forth in time with a multitude of characters, digressions and family members. Among other things, the reader must keep up with "who is who" among almost 40 members of the Cottenham family (spelled three different ways).

In giving real flesh and blood to its narrative, "Slavery by Another Name" appears in a few places to go beyond its sources in describing personal characteristics and motives based only on bare-bones government and census records. The book's subtitle also overreaches since, in fact, the work analyzes patterns of enslavement only through the 1920s, not to World War II.