![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
These Truths
4/5. Specifically a political history. An ideas history. The sort of history that has few details of battle dates and tactics, and many details of what we fought over. This book is very good as an antidote to the sort of historical education I got, as it tells the story of slavery as the story of this nation. How we fought and agonized over it from before the Constitution was ever written, what it cost, what it really looked like. I didn't get that in my AP U.S. History class, I tell you what.
I will say that this book, for all its bulk, can be oddly conclusory. I found myself shaking my head and muttering "yeah, no," about a number of things in the final few chapters covering the history I've lived through, which always makes you wonder about what has come before. And speaking of that bulk, you could strip a good 20,000 words out of this book in flourish alone. She fancies herself quite the prose stylist. She's not always right. AS a small example, she announces in the intro that she will keep the footnotes "clipped and short, like a baby's fingernails," which aside from being a straight up weird simile, is a tiny example of chronic over-writing. When you are making the point that you are keeping something clipped short, you don't add a rhetorical flourish! Come on! It's innocuous in the singular; when a thousand similar choices are made, it's shaggy at best.
On the plus side, this is the exception to Light's first rule of audiobook production: thou shalt not let the author read the audiobook. She does it, and she's good at it.
4/5. Specifically a political history. An ideas history. The sort of history that has few details of battle dates and tactics, and many details of what we fought over. This book is very good as an antidote to the sort of historical education I got, as it tells the story of slavery as the story of this nation. How we fought and agonized over it from before the Constitution was ever written, what it cost, what it really looked like. I didn't get that in my AP U.S. History class, I tell you what.
I will say that this book, for all its bulk, can be oddly conclusory. I found myself shaking my head and muttering "yeah, no," about a number of things in the final few chapters covering the history I've lived through, which always makes you wonder about what has come before. And speaking of that bulk, you could strip a good 20,000 words out of this book in flourish alone. She fancies herself quite the prose stylist. She's not always right. AS a small example, she announces in the intro that she will keep the footnotes "clipped and short, like a baby's fingernails," which aside from being a straight up weird simile, is a tiny example of chronic over-writing. When you are making the point that you are keeping something clipped short, you don't add a rhetorical flourish! Come on! It's innocuous in the singular; when a thousand similar choices are made, it's shaggy at best.
On the plus side, this is the exception to Light's first rule of audiobook production: thou shalt not let the author read the audiobook. She does it, and she's good at it.
