John Robert Bond, son of a white Englishwoman and a black laborer on the Liverpool waterfront, became a sailor in the American Union Navy and married Emma Thomas, a Virginia woman born into slavery, in 1865. Chronicling their lives and those of their children and grandchildren, the author (their great-granddaughter Adele Logan Alexander) presents a dramatic family saga intertwined with a sweeping account of the black experience in America from 1846, the year of John's birth, to 1926, when Emma died at age 80. Most of the Bonds were talented, determined, and successful beyond the norm--John and Emma's progeny included a prosperous businessman and a Radcliffe graduate who was a close friend of W.E.B. Du Bois--but Alexander firmly links their story to the struggles and suffering of all African Americans, delineating with blistering matter-of-factness the galling restrictions they faced every day in every generation. Alexander, a professor of history at George Washington University, provides a bracingly unsentimental perspective on events as big as the Civil War and as seemingly small as the installation of a new sewer system in Dedham, Massachusetts. She writes American history with a refreshing difference, reminding us of the richness that oft-maligned "multiculturalism" brings to our intellectual life. --Wendy Smith
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