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Title details for Slaves in the Family by Edward Ball - Available

Slaves in the Family

by Edward Ball
Edward Ball
Audiobook (Includes supplementary content)
1 of 1 copy available
Borrow Listen to a sample Listen to a sample
1 of 1 copy available

This program is read by the author.
Decades after this celebrated work of narrative nonfiction won the National Book Award and changed the American conversation about race, Slaves in the Family makes its audio debut, with a new preface by the author.
The Ball family hails from South Carolina—Charleston and thereabouts. Their plantations were among the oldest and longest-standing plantations in the South. Between 1698 and 1865, close to four thousand black people were born into slavery under the Balls or were bought by them.
In Slaves in the Family, Edward Ball recounts his efforts to track down and meet the descendants of his family's slaves. Part historical narrative, part oral history, part personal story of investigation and catharsis, Slaves in the Family is, in the words of Pat Conroy, "a work of breathtaking generosity and courage, a magnificent study of the complexity and strangeness and beauty of the word 'family.'"

  • Creators

  • Series

    FSG Classics

  • Publisher

  • Release date

    January 22, 2019

  • Formats

    • OverDrive Listen audiobook

      • ISBN: 9781250213365
      • File size: 583710 KB
      • Duration: 20:16:03

  • Languages

    • English

  • Reviews

    • AudioFile Magazine
      To listeners' good fortune, author Edward Ball narrates as well as many top professionals. His delivery of this fascinating volume, although abridged, offers rewards that the printed version does not. Ball belongs to Southern gentility, a family ensconced in South Carolina since colonial times and once slave-owning plantation farmers. Driven partly by morbid fascination, he traces the descendants of his family's slaves, some of whom turn out to be kin. His account of his search and discoveries is part history, part detective story focusing on the human consequences of "the peculiar institution." All this another reader could have given us with equal clarity and aplomb, except for one thing. In his otherwise Apollonian delivery, Ball gives us the tone of voice, the expressive cadences of his interviewees, thus rendering subtleties of attitude he alone can give us authoritatively--and only in the telling, not the writing. Director Karen Fillman deserves kudos, too, for helping her reader do justice to this true tale with intimacy and taste. Y.R. Winner of AUDIOFILE Earphones Award (c)AudioFile, Portland, Maine

Formats

  • OverDrive Listen audiobook

subjects

Languages

  • English

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