This is long-form journalism meets poetry, and it's great. It's an honest and heart-breaking look at where we are as a society today when it comes to acknowledging and dealing with the legacy of slavery. Clint Smith's humble but no-nonsense approach to teaching history (make sure you watch his Crash Course series on Black History on YouTube!) comes through strongly in his personal accounts of the places he visited and how they impacted him. The chapter on New York City is eye-opening on several levels, and his interviews with his own grandparents in the Epilogue anchor the entire narrative in time and force the reader to accept that the practice of slavery in America is not ancient history. It is as recent as the California Gold Rush, or the invention of the telephone, and yet we hardly ever talk about it. This book could change that.