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Life of a Klansman by Edward Ball (2020 Hardcover) - BRAND NEW!!
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eBay item number:116670607963
Item specifics
- Condition
- Brand New: A new, unread, unused book in perfect condition with no missing or damaged pages. See all condition definitionsopens in a new window or tab
- Signed
- No
- Narrative Type
- Nonfiction
- ISBN
- 9780374186326
About this product
Product Identifiers
Publisher
Farrar, Straus & Giroux
ISBN-10
0374186324
ISBN-13
9780374186326
eBay Product ID (ePID)
8038312555
Product Key Features
Book Title
Life of a Klansman : a Family History in White Supremacy
Number of Pages
416 Pages
Language
English
Publication Year
2020
Topic
Discrimination & Race Relations, United States / 19th Century, United States / State & Local / South (Al, Ar, Fl, Ga, Ky, La, ms, Nc, SC, Tn, VA, WV), Personal Memoirs, United States / Civil War Period (1850-1877), General, Anthropology / Cultural & Social
Illustrator
Yes
Genre
Social Science, Biography & Autobiography, History
Format
Hardcover
Dimensions
Item Height
1.4 in
Item Weight
22.6 Oz
Item Length
9.1 in
Item Width
6.5 in
Additional Product Features
Intended Audience
Trade
LCCN
2020-003403
Reviews
" A violent legacy stirs a deep meditation on the nature of racism in this anguished study of Civil War-era New Orleans . . . [Edward Ball] vividly reconstructs the mindset that propelled [his great-great-grandfather]--a resentful, working-class striver nostalgic for his family's formerly privileged position atop New Orleans' complex racial hierarchy--into racist activism . . . The result is a clear-eyed work of historical reclamation and an intimate, self-lacerating take on memory and collective responsibility." -- Publishers Weekly (starred review) "There is no other writer of nonfiction about race writing today who has taken us deeper into our greatest national and familial dilemma than Edward Ball. Life of a Klansman is a deeply personal history, a brave work, and a lodestar for how we have arrived at yet another reckoning about white supremacy. Ball demonstrates here, for all who wish to try, just how to face, narrate, and understand our past even when we find ancestors and stories we might wish away. In his work, he allows for no looking away, and he does so in lyrical prose." --David W. Blight, Sterling Professor of History at Yale University and Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Frederick Douglass: Prophet of Freedom "If you are a white American, Edward Ball calculates, the odds that you have a Klansman in your family tree are one in two. In this singular work of imaginative reconstruction, Ball brings his own family's Klansman out of the closet and into the light. With a detective's tenacity, Life of a Klansman personalizes the terror of white supremacy as it builds toward a crescendo that sears the soul." -- Nancy MacLean, author of Democracy in Chains: The Deep History of the Radical Right's Stealth Plan for America and Behind the Mask of Chivalry: The Making of the Second Ku Klux Klan "Edward Ball's fascinating Life of A Klansman escapes genres. His art combines imagination and history to tell the story of the sometimes brutal, often mundane, life of his ancestor, a New Orleans carpenter who became 'our klansman.' Delicately balancing empathy and disgust, he examines the chokehold whiteness and white supremacy have fastened on public memory." --Richard White, Margaret Byrne Professor of American History at Stanford University, "Edward Ball's fascinating Life of A Klansman escapes genres. His art combines imagination and history to tell the story of the sometimes brutal, often mundane, life of his ancestor, a New Orleans carpenter who became 'our klansman.' Delicately balancing empathy and disgust, he examines the chokehold whiteness and white supremacy have fastened on public memory." --Richard White, Margaret Byrne Professor of American History at Stanford University, "[A] resonant tale . . . [and] a self-searching meditation . . . An illuminating contribution to the literature of race and racism in America." -- Kirkus Reviews (starred review) "A violent legacy stirs a deep meditation on the nature of racism in this anguished study of Civil War-era New Orleans . . . [Edward Ball] vividly reconstructs the mindset that propelled [his great-great-grandfather]--a resentful, working-class striver nostalgic for his family's formerly privileged position atop New Orleans' complex racial hierarchy--into racist activism . . . The result is a clear-eyed work of historical reclamation and an intimate, self-lacerating take on memory and collective responsibility." -- Publishers Weekly (starred review) "Spanning most of the 19th century, Life of a Klansman is a nuanced case study of one cog within a machine of terrorism and oppression . . . [a] nuanced biography . . . In flexing his imagination, Ball creates a dynamic space for challenging reconciliation, breaking from the narrative periodically to reflect with empathy for family members acting in ways he abhors, yet never absolving them." -- Shelf Awareness "There is no other writer of nonfiction about race writing today who has taken us deeper into our greatest national and familial dilemma than Edward Ball. Life of a Klansman is a deeply personal history, a brave work, and a lodestar for how we have arrived at yet another reckoning about white supremacy. Ball demonstrates here, for all who wish to try, just how to face, narrate, and understand our past even when we find ancestors and stories we might wish away. In his work, he allows for no looking away, and he does so in lyrical prose." --David W. Blight, Sterling Professor of History at Yale University and Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Frederick Douglass: Prophet of Freedom "In this compelling narrative of the life of a klansman, Edward Ball reckons with the history of whiteness that has shaped the U.S. and which is his personal inheritance. Ball confronts the violence and hatred at the foundation of white authority and privilege by recounting his great-great-grandfather's worldview and acts of brutality. It is easy to recoil from the ugliness documented in these pages; much more difficult is the task of acknowledging that murder and terror are the bedrock of the nation. Life of A Klansman is a must-read, now more than ever." -- Saidiya Hartman, professor of English and comparative literature at Columbia University and author of Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments "If you are a white American, Edward Ball calculates, the odds that you have a Klansman in your family tree are one in two. In this singular work of imaginative reconstruction, Ball brings his own family's Klansman out of the closet and into the light. With a detective's tenacity, Life of a Klansman personalizes the terror of white supremacy as it builds toward a crescendo that sears the soul." -- Nancy MacLean, William H. Chafe Distinguished Professor at Duke University and author of Democracy in Chains: The Deep History of the Radical Right's Stealth Plan for America and Behind the Mask of Chivalry: The Making of the Second Ku Klux Klan "Edward Ball's fascinating Life of A Klansman escapes genres. His art combines imagination and history to tell the story of the sometimes brutal, often mundane, life of his ancestor, a New Orleans carpenter who became 'our klansman.' Delicately balancing empathy and disgust, he examines the chokehold whiteness and white supremacy have fastened on public memory." --Richard White, Margaret Byrne Professor of American History at Stanford University and author of The Republic for Which It Stands, " A violent legacy stirs a deep meditation on the nature of racism in this anguished study of Civil War-era New Orleans . . . [Edward Ball] vividly reconstructs the mindset that propelled [his great-great-grandfather]--a resentful, working-class striver nostalgic for his family's formerly privileged position atop New Orleans' complex racial hierarchy--into racist activism . . . The result is a clear-eyed work of historical reclamation and an intimate, self-lacerating take on memory and collective responsibility." -- Publishers Weekly (starred review) "If you are a white American, Edward Ball calculates, the odds that you have a Klansman in your family tree are one in two. In this singular work of imaginative reconstruction, Ball brings his own family's Klansman out of the closet and into the light. With a detective's tenacity, Life of a Klansman personalizes the terror of white supremacy as it builds toward a crescendo that sears the soul." -- Nancy MacLean, author of Democracy in Chains: The Deep History of the Radical Right's Stealth Plan for America and Behind the Mask of Chivalry: The Making of the Second Ku Klux Klan "Edward Ball's fascinating Life of A Klansman escapes genres. His art combines imagination and history to tell the story of the sometimes brutal, often mundane, life of his ancestor, a New Orleans carpenter who became 'our klansman.' Delicately balancing empathy and disgust, he examines the chokehold whiteness and white supremacy have fastened on public memory." --Richard White, Margaret Byrne Professor of American History at Stanford University, "[A] resonant tale . . . [and] a self-searching meditation . . . An illuminating contribution to the literature of race and racism in America." -- Kirkus Reviews (starred review) "A violent legacy stirs a deep meditation on the nature of racism in this anguished study of Civil War-era New Orleans . . . [Edward Ball] vividly reconstructs the mindset that propelled [his great-great-grandfather]--a resentful, working-class striver nostalgic for his family's formerly privileged position atop New Orleans' complex racial hierarchy--into racist activism . . . The result is a clear-eyed work of historical reclamation and an intimate, self-lacerating take on memory and collective responsibility." -- Publishers Weekly (starred review) "There is no other writer of nonfiction about race writing today who has taken us deeper into our greatest national and familial dilemma than Edward Ball. Life of a Klansman is a deeply personal history, a brave work, and a lodestar for how we have arrived at yet another reckoning about white supremacy. Ball demonstrates here, for all who wish to try, just how to face, narrate, and understand our past even when we find ancestors and stories we might wish away. In his work, he allows for no looking away, and he does so in lyrical prose." --David W. Blight, Sterling Professor of History at Yale University and Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Frederick Douglass: Prophet of Freedom "In this compelling narrative of the life of a klansman, Edward Ball reckons with the history of whiteness that has shaped the U.S. and which is his personal inheritance. Ball confronts the violence and hatred at the foundation of white authority and privilege by recounting his great-great-grandfather's worldview and acts of brutality. It is easy to recoil from the ugliness documented in these pages; much more difficult is the task of acknowledging that murder and terror are the bedrock of the nation. Life of A Klansman is a must-read, now more than ever." -- Saidiya Hartman, professor of English and comparative literature at Columbia University and author of Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments "If you are a white American, Edward Ball calculates, the odds that you have a Klansman in your family tree are one in two. In this singular work of imaginative reconstruction, Ball brings his own family's Klansman out of the closet and into the light. With a detective's tenacity, Life of a Klansman personalizes the terror of white supremacy as it builds toward a crescendo that sears the soul." -- Nancy MacLean, William H. Chafe Distinguished Professor at Duke University and author of Democracy in Chains: The Deep History of the Radical Right's Stealth Plan for America and Behind the Mask of Chivalry: The Making of the Second Ku Klux Klan "Edward Ball's fascinating Life of A Klansman escapes genres. His art combines imagination and history to tell the story of the sometimes brutal, often mundane, life of his ancestor, a New Orleans carpenter who became 'our klansman.' Delicately balancing empathy and disgust, he examines the chokehold whiteness and white supremacy have fastened on public memory." --Richard White, Margaret Byrne Professor of American History at Stanford University and author of The Republic for Which It Stands
Dewey Edition
23
Dewey Decimal
305.800976335
Synopsis
A trenchant exploration of a family's legacy of white supremacy from National Book Award-winner Edward Ball. Eighty million: this figure, in Edward Ball's estimation, represents the number of Americans with at least one ancestor in the Ku Klux Klan. Yet the stories of these Klansmen--our national Klansmen--remain largely untold. They are white skeletons mouldering in family closets, in the North as well as the South. Now, in this pioneering and punctiliously researched microhistory, Ball ( Slaves in the Family ) turns his attention back to the subject that brought him to national fame: the mechanisms of white supremacy in America, as understood through the lives of his own ancestors. Life of a Klansman is the story of Polycarp Constant Lecorgne, a carpenter from New Orleans, a member of the White League, a guerilla fighter for the Klan, and the author's great-great-grandfather. Ball takes readers back to a time when Louisiana was on the ragged frontier of Napoleon's former empire--a place where racial lines were occasionally blurred, and where Constant's father Yves even rented his house from a freewoman of color. Life of a Klansman traces Louisiana's tortured racial history, from the Creole caste system to the American Civil War to Reconstruction, when petits blancs like Constant violently rejected what they perceived as an imposed threat to the hierarchy of white and black. From street battles with the Metropolitan Police to conversations in his aunt's kitchen, Ball examines how the "Ku-Klux" (in his family's parlance) has waxed and waned and waxed again in the century and a half since America's race war supposedly ended at Appomattox. The result is a forceful argument for a national reckoning, one in which family lore is upturned and the shameful legacies of the Klansmen are disinterred. "Why retrieve from obscurity this bitter and bloody Klan story?" Ball writes. "There is a personal motive, and that is that it bothers me. Constant Lecorgne was not a thoughtful man--he could write an invoice for his carpentry work, but that's all--and he did not develop the idea of white entitlement that still circulates, like an odorless gas in the ductwork, in 2019. But god knows he put steel in that process, and he damaged the lives of thousands. To put it in a religious frame, when you find a body, as I have, it needs to be waked.", "A haunting tapestry of interwoven stories that inform us not just about our past but about the resentment-bred demons that are all too present in our society today . . . The interconnected strands of race and history give Ball's entrancing stories a Faulknerian resonance." --Walter Isaacson, The New York Times Book Review A 2020 NPR staff pick One of The New York Times ' thirteen books to watch for in August One of The Washington Post 's ten books to read in August A Literary Hub best book of the summer One of Kirkus Reviews' sixteen best books to read in August The life and times of a militant white supremacist, written by one of his offspring, National Book Award-winner Edward Ball Life of a Klansman tells the story of a warrior in the Ku Klux Klan, a carpenter in Louisiana who took up the cause of fanatical racism during the years after the Civil War. Edward Ball, a descendant of the Klansman, paints a portrait of his family's anti-black militant that is part history, part memoir rich in personal detail. Sifting through family lore about "our Klansman" as well as public and private records, Ball reconstructs the story of his great-great grandfather, Constant Lecorgne. A white French Creole, father of five, and working class ship carpenter, Lecorgne had a career in white terror of notable and bloody completeness: massacres, night riding, masked marches, street rampages--all part of a tireless effort that he and other Klansmen made to restore white power when it was threatened by the emancipation of four million enslaved African Americans. To offer a non-white view of the Ku-klux, Ball seeks out descendants of African Americans who were once victimized by "our Klansman" and his comrades, and shares their stories. For whites, to have a Klansman in the family tree is no rare thing: Demographic estimates suggest that fifty percent of whites in the United States have at least one ancestor who belonged to the Ku Klux Klan at some point in its history. That is, one-half of white Americans could write a Klan family memoir, if they wished . In an era when racist ideology and violence are again loose in the public square, Life of a Klansman offers a personal origin story of white supremacy. Ball's family memoir traces the vines that have grown from militant roots in the Old South into the bitter fruit of the present, when whiteness is again a cause that can veer into hate and domestic terror.
LC Classification Number
F379.N553L433 2020
Item description from the seller
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Seller feedback (4,818)
- a***_ (1352)- Feedback left by buyer.Past monthVerified purchaseA+ seller! Fast shipping and great prices! Highly recommended!
- u***- (67)- Feedback left by buyer.Past monthVerified purchaseGreat seller!
- 1***l (108)- Feedback left by buyer.Past monthVerified purchaseVery nice just as promised and very well packed