Play Audiobook Sample
Life of a Klansman: A Family History in White Supremacy Audiobook
Play Audiobook Sample
(0.00) - 0 listener ratings
Quick Stats About this Audiobook
Total Audiobook Chapters:
Longest Chapter Length:
Shortest Chapter Length:
Average Chapter Length:
Audiobooks by this Author:
Publisher Description
Named a best book of the summer by Literary Hub
The life and times of a militant white supremacist, written by one of his offspring, National Book Award–winner Edward Ball
Life of a Klansman tells the story of a warrior in the Ku Klux Klan, a carpenter in Louisiana who took up the cause of fanatical racism during the years after the Civil War. Edward Ball, a descendant of the Klansman, paints a portrait of his family’s anti-black militant that is part history, part memoir rich in personal detail.
Sifting through family lore about “our Klansman” as well as public and private records, Ball reconstructs the story of his great-great grandfather, Constant Lecorgne. A white French Creole, father of five, and working class ship carpenter, Lecorgne had a career in white terror of notable and bloody completeness: massacres, night riding, masked marches, street rampages—all part of a tireless effort that he and other Klansmen made to restore white power when it was threatened by the emancipation of four million enslaved African Americans. To offer a non-white view of the Ku-klux, Ball seeks out descendants of African Americans who were once victimized by “our Klansman” and his comrades, and shares their stories.
For whites, to have a Klansman in the family tree is no rare thing: Demographic estimates suggest that fifty percent of whites in the United States have at least one ancestor who belonged to the Ku Klux Klan at some point in its history. That is, one-half of white Americans could write a Klan family memoir, if they wished.
In an era when racist ideology and violence are again loose in the public square, Life of a Klansman offers a personal origin story of white supremacy. Ball’s family memoir traces the vines that have grown from militant roots in the Old South into the bitter fruit of the present, when whiteness is again a cause that can veer into hate and domestic terror.
A Macmillan Audio production from Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Download and start listening now!
“A haunting tapestry of interwoven stories that inform us not just about our past but about the resentment-bred demons that are all too present in our society today.”
— Walter Isaacson, #1 New York Times bestselling author
Quotes
-
“Brave, revealing and intimate, as well as an exploration of how one family’s morally complicated past echoes down to the present.”
— Wall Street Journal -
“Ball offers a particularly piercing psychoanalytic reading of the present, even though his subject is the past.”
— New Republic -
“A clear-eyed work of historical reclamation and an intimate, self-lacerating take on memory and collective responsibility.”
— Publishers Weekly (starred review) -
“Ball refuses to ‘disown’ the past…Accordingly, he approaches his ancestor’s story with shame, but also sympathy and imagination.”
— Harper’s -
“A public reckoning with white supremacy…Ball’s book is about the postbellum US and the US in 2020; it’s looking both directions at once.”
— Boston Globe -
“A violent legacy stirs a deep meditation on the nature of racism.”
— Publishers Weekly (starred review) -
“A powerful, horrifying history of a family and a nation.”
— Booklist (starred review) -
“A nuanced case study of one cog within a machine of terrorism and oppression.”
— Shelf Awareness (starred review)
Awards
-
A Washington Post Pick of the Month
-
A Kirkus Reviews Pick of Best Books of the Month
-
A New York Times Pick of Books to Watch For
-
A Literary Hub Pick of Best Books of Summer
-
A Booklist Pick of Best New Books
-
A New York Times Book Review Editor’s Choice
-
Among longlisted titles for Kirkus Reviews Best Books of the Year, 2020
-
Among longlisted titles for NPR Best Book of the Year, 2020
-
Among longlisted titles for Kirkus Reviews Best Books of the Year, 2020
-
Among longlisted titles for NPR Best Book of the Year, 2020
Life of a Klansman Listener Reviews
Be the first to write a review about this audiobook!
About Edward Ball
Edward Ball is the author of six books, including Slaves in the Family, an account of his family’s history as slaveholders in South Carolina, which received the National Book Award for Nonfiction. He has taught at Yale University and has been awarded fellowships by the Radcliffe Institute at Harvard and the New York Public Library’s Cullman Center. He is also the recipient of a Public Scholar Award from the National Endowment for the Humanities.