Reviews with content warning for Violence - How the Word Is Passed: A Reckoning with the History of Slavery Across America

Poetic, powerful, and thought-provoking. Filled in some gaps in my education while inspiring me to seek out more information on the world’s cruel history.

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amsswim's review against another edition

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emotional informative reflective sad medium-paced

5.0

I very much encourage everyone to read or listen to this book. Follow the author to important heritage sites to the legacy of slavery through the US and beyond; plantations, prisons, confederate cemeteries. Made me very reflective on random interactions I have had over the years and how the people in my family history may have interacted. The content is graphic and unflinching, which is entirely necessary. It is also one of the best written non-fiction books I have read, I believe because you are going on a journey with the author. I am unable to summarize so much of one amazing book, so I am just going to say again read it.

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discarded_dust_jacket's review against another edition

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challenging emotional informative reflective medium-paced

3.5

This is such a poignant and well-written book. Smith has such a talent for making the locations mentioned (and by extension, their history) so viscerally tangible; it felt like you were standing there with him, experiencing the weight of those places alongside him.

The locations themselves were well-curated: highlighting both places where we, as present day Americans, are attempting to reckon with our nation’s past relationship with chattel slavery, and places where we are instead choosing to prioritize comfort over truth.

It asks us to question (among other things) all we’ve been taught about a) those who were supposedly “the good guys” like Thomas Jefferson, and b) the “innocence” of northern cities, both pre- and post-civil war. It asks us not to shy away from discomfort, but to face the ugly truth head on. And no matter what was being discussed, it continued to remind us of the personhood of enslaved people—never allowing us to reduce the enslaved population of the United States to a faceless, amorphous concept in our minds, but instead repeatedly giving enslaved people names, identities, cultures, and deep familial bonds. Always always always reminding us: these were human beings. These were people. I really appreciated that aspect of Smith’s storytelling.

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jaiari12's review

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challenging informative reflective medium-paced

5.0

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analenegrace's review

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challenging informative

I was fortunate enough to meet Clint Smith and get a free signed copy at a university book event over a year ago, but I just now got to reading it. Smith is an amazing writer whose poetry clearly influences his prose, and it is written in such a compelling and beautiful book, even with the difficult subject matter.

I cannot recommend reading this book, especially if you're trying to deconstruct what racism in America looks like. While there are so many lines I marked as pivotal to the book, the most important comes on page 289 in his epilogue,

"The history of slavery is the history of the United States. It was not peripheral to our founding; it was central to it. It is not irrelevant to our contemporary society; it created it. This history is in our soil, it is in our policies, and it must, too, be in our memories."

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heatherilene's review against another edition

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challenging emotional informative reflective sad medium-paced

5.0

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unsuccessfulbookclub's review

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challenging emotional hopeful informative medium-paced

5.0

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