Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

I bought this book out of an interest in the subject matter and relying on the impressive credentials of its author. I anticipated that this would be an actual history that would bring many primary source materials together to paint a cohesive picture of the "Hemingses of Monticello." As Gordon-Reed expressly states, Sally Hemings is a cipher, since there is so little epistolary or other primary source material extant to flesh out her presence in the narrative. Gordon-Reed seems to believe that that gives her unlimited license to project whatever thoughts, experiences, and motivations she likes upon someone who is very close to a blank page in history. It is unfair that Sally Hemings is very nearly a blank page--which injustice is not rectified by essentially inventing a persona and events for her life out of the author's imagination and suppositions. The grossest disservice of all is Gordon-Reed's supposition that Sally Hemings was defined entirely by her enslavement, despite considerable evidence to the contrary. Human beings, even enslaved ones, are more than the sum of their circumstances. Gordon-Reed herself discusses the dangers of speculation about and projecting modern values upon historical subjects--and then disingenuously proceeds to do just that. Concerning both the Hemingses and Jeffersons et al, this book is full of outrageously broad generalizations, wild speculation, and leaps of imagination made and taken from the historical and moral perspective of a modern academic. One would expect more rigorous intellectual discipline from any author who purports to interpret history. No one who picks up this book is likely to need convincing of the horrors of slavery--or even of 18th-century white male European patriarchy--but Gordon-Reed spends the better part of 700 pages bending others' scholarship to serve an agenda which admits of no historical context for, or alternative understandings of, actual facts. Gordon-Reed is welcome to an agenda, but it isn't history. Since I am one of those who cannot stop reading a book--any book--before the end, I have spent the better part of the last 24 hours seething over "The Hemingses of Monticello" and what I consider to be false marketing of this work. Evidently I will have to track down and read the materials cited in the bibliography to get real information on the subject.