March 2023 Book, The Known World
Talk About Books meets every third Wednesday of the month at 6:30 at Guilford Free Library. There is a zoom option available, though most people are attending in person. FRIEDRICH ENGELS once said that he learned more about postrevolutionary French society from Balzac than from ''all the professed historians, economists and statisticians of the period together.'' The same might be said of slavery in America and Edward P. Jones who writes about its history not as if it were fixed in time, safely over and done with, but as if anything could happen in the chaos of the moment. The Known World opens with the death of a master of 33 slaves in antebellum Virginia. None of his property grows teary-eyed, though, at the news that Henry Townsend has died. They surely don't know that when he obtained his first slave he wanted to be ''the kind of shepherd master God had intended,'' someone who would provide ''good food for his slaves, no whi