Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

Confronting the Past

How the Word is Passed: A Reckoning with the History of Slavery Across America by Clint Smith

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Bingo: Diaspora. This book about American slavery ties to the African diaspora that occurred due to the transatlantic slave trade. 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. The history is in our soil, it is in our policies, and it must, too, be in our memories.” Clint Smith’s How the Word is Passed: A Reckoning with the History […]

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How the Word is Passed by Clint Smith

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“The sky above the Mississippi River stretched out like a sky.” This is a book that seeks out physical spaces tied to slavery in the US, look into the ways they tell (or don’t tell) the history upon they’re situated, and ask questions about how that history is told, by whom, and to whom. The book begins with Clint Smith visiting Monticello, the plantation estate built by Thomas Jefferson overlooking the area around Charlottesville. If you go there now, the estate’s history is told through […]

“At some point it is no longer a question of whether we can learn this history but whether we have the collective will to reckon with it.”

How the Word Is Passed: A Reckoning with the History of Slavery Across America by Clint Smith

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When I was growing up, my parents rarely took us on “vacation.” But every summer, we would pile in the station wagon and drive some number of hours to visit family, in Ohio, Maryland, Virginia, New York. My mother was both a US history buff, and operating on a shoe-string budget. This, my friends, means that my brother and I have visited almost every Revolutionary or Civil War battle ground or relevant historic home within a 50-mile radius of Baltimore, DC, or Wilmington, DE. Plus […]

Please read this stunning book

How the Word Is Passed by Clint Smith

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There is VERY much a reason why this book is topping so many best-of lists in 2021. The most important thing to take away from this review is that you should read this book.  It is extraordinary. This is a work of non-fiction in which the author visits 9 different sites, in the US and abroad. At each location, Smith vacillates between exploring the local connections to slavery (sometimes more explicit than others) and meditating more broadly on how our society should shape itself around […]



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