Passing Strange: A Gilded Age Tale of Love and Deception Across the Color Line - Hardcover

Sandweiss, Martha A.

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1594202001 ISBN 13: 9781594202001

Publisher: Penguin Press HC, The, 2009

Synopsis

Traces the secret double life of a nineteenth-century scientist and surveyor of the post-Civil War American West, revealing the mixed heritage that enabled him to cross color lines and conduct a second existence as a black Pullman porter and steelworker with an African-American wife and five multi-racial children. 30,000 first printing.

About this title

About the Author

Martha A. Sandweiss is Professor of History at Princeton University. She began her career as a museum curator and taught for twenty years at Amherst College. She is the author of numerous works on western American history and the history of photography, including Print the Legend: Photography and the American West, winner of the Organization of American Historians' Ray Allen Billington Award, and Laura Gilpin: An Enduring Grace, and is the co-editor of the Oxford History of the American West.

From AudioFile

It reads like fiction, but it isn't. At the end of the nineteenth century, Clarence King led a double life. To his mother and friends, like statesman John Hay and author Henry Adams, he was a well-known geologist who helped map the American West. To his African-American wife, Ada, he was James Todd, a Pullman porter and the father of her five children. Lorna Raver reads with enthusiasm and a deliberate delivery. There isn't much opportunity for characterizations as Ada and Clarence/James don't speak, but Raver makes sure you don't miss a word of this well-researched story. At the end of his life Clarence/James confessed to Ada, and his friends took care of her. A feel-good story well presented. J.B.G. © AudioFile 2009, Portland, Maine

About this edition

• Publisher: Penguin Press HC, The
• Publication date: 2009
• ISBN 10: 1594202001
• ISBN 13: 9781594202001
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 384