I will admit that I wanted to read this book almost exclusively because of a borderline throwaway line in a National Geographic documentary from the early 90s. And this book wasn't as terrible as the review might make it seem, but it wasn't super great either, to be honest. There were parts where Taylor's writing about enslaved people struck me as like... gross and weird? Which made this book a little difficult, given that it's about an enslaved man. She at one point said that being polite and tactful was "second nature" to Paul Jennings and that really strikes me as terrifyingly close to like undermining the situation in which he lived that made it so he had to learn to do that?

And I guess I'm just confused how a book about an enslaved person like this can exist with writing like that in a post-Orlando Patterson/Saidiya Hartman/so many other people world? I get that it's meant for a popular audience, but I don't think that excuses a lack of really digging into what it meant to be an enslaved person. Taylor does it at times, noting the differences in experiences between those working in the house versus those working in the fields, but there's a lot more that could and honestly should have been done in grappling with that.

That being said, there was some decent information in there about enslavement in Washington, DC, and I do think bringing Jennings's life to the fore is an important project; I just wish it had been done with a little more care and reference to the larger historiography and theorization that's out there.