The Living Consequences

Tom DeWolf, the author of Inheriting the Trade, was interviewed this afternoon on the Cliff Kelley Show on WVON-AM radio (“The Talk of Chicago”).

This turned into a lengthy and well-received interview, with Tom being asked to stay well into the show’s second hour to continue the conversation and being asked to return another time.

I have several comments after the jump, but the full interview with Tom can be heard here.

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 The Christian Science Monitor has a review of Tom DeWolf’s Inheriting the Trade in tomorrow morning’s edition, entitled “An Honest Look at a Slave-Trading Family’s Past.”

The reviewer, book editor Marjorie Kehe, finds particular value in Tom’s “spirit of honesty and the willingness to confront the ugly parts of human experience,” concluding that while Tom offers no easy answers to the difficult questions he raises, “honest self-examination remains an excellent place to start.”

The online version of the review also offers an audio interview which Kehe conducted with Tom.

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Paul Davis, the Providence Journal writer who has previously chronicled Traces of the Trade and the history of the slave trade in Rhode Island, has a new feature story about Tom DeWolf’s Inheriting the Trade: A Northern Family Confronts Its Legacy as the Largest Slave-Trading Family in U.S. History in Sunday’s edition (available online now).

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The Providence Journal, which has frequently covered Traces of the Trade and other stories relating to the history of Rhode Island and the slave trade, has a review in Sunday’s edition of Tom DeWolf’s Inheriting the Trade: A Northern Family Confronts Its Legacy as the Largest Slave-Trading Dynasty in U.S. History.

The book review is a companion to a feature story about the film leading the Sunday arts section, but the review is available online now. The review is not kind, but I think the reviewer’s reasoning is highly instructive about Tom’s intended audience.

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While we were in Park City, Utah for the Sundance Film Festival, my cousin Tom DeWolf appeared on C-SPAN 2’s Book TV. The program, which ran an hour and 15 minutes, can currently be viewed online here.

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The Denver Post has an excellent article this morning on Traces of the Trade and Inheriting the Trade, featuring my distant cousins Keila and Holly, and our friend and colleague Harold Fields.

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Wednesday marked the publication of my cousin Tom’s book, Inheriting the Trade: A Northern Family Confronts Its Legacy as the Largest Slave-Trading Dynasty in U.S. History

The launch event was at the Olsson’s Books and Records in Penn Quarter in Washington, D.C. The event, which included an author reading and book signing, drew an overflow crowd of 75 people.

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My distant cousin, Tom, has written a book, Inheriting the Trade, about the journey we undertook in Traces of the Trade and due out in January.

Tom has now started a blog on his web site. (My blogroll has linked there for some time now, but he’s actually started posting.) Based on his initial posts, Tom is going to be every bit as insightful a blogger as he is a book author.

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Brilliance Audio, which is publishing the audio edition of my cousin Tom’s book, Inheriting the Trade, has decided to have Tom narrate the audio edition himself!

I think this is a wonderful idea. Not only does Tom have a strong and compelling speaking voice, but the book is essentially a memoir, and a particularly personal and powerful one. Having Tom provide the voice himself is just perfect.

We interviewed Professor Charles Ogletree of Harvard Law School for Traces of the Trade, in which he provides a sobering assessment of race in our society today, as well as one of the film’s most popular and light-hearted lines. Professor Ogletree, who is a leading figure in the reparations movement and executive director of the Charles Hamilton Houston Institute for Race and Justice, has offered the following thoughts about Inheriting the Trade:

“Inheriting the Trade is a candid, powerful and insightful book about how one family dealt with the infamous slave trade. This book is jarring in its candor, and revealing in its honest assessment of slavery and the Dewolf family. We must read important books like this one, if we dare to appreciate every aspect of our history, and as the Dewolf family does, dare to change our judgments about the wretched history of slavery.”