Janet Maslin
Passing Strange tells an astounding true story that would beggar most novelists' imaginations…Ms. Sandweiss offers a fine, mesmerizing account of how one extremely secretive man, "acting from a complicated mix of loyalty and self-interest, reckless desire and social conservatism," could encapsulate his country's shifting ideas about race in the course of one family's anything but black-and-white history.
—The New York Times
Annette Gordon-Reed
…there was another side to King that neither the public nor his glittering friends knew, a side that Martha A. Sandweiss explores with great sensitivity, insight and painstaking research in Passing Strange. The title of this immensely fascinating work provides a broad hint: King lived a racial double life…Passing Strange is ultimately a book about a couple, and Sandweiss has used her formidable skills as a researcher to reconstruct as much of their lives as possible.
—The Washington Post
Kirkus Reviews
One of the best-known men of his time crosses the racial divide-in reverse. Well-born traveler, scientist, explorer and writer Clarence King enjoyed great privilege. In the words of Western historian Sandweiss (American Studies/Amherst Coll.; Print the Legen: Photography and the American West, 2002, etc.), he went through life "tempted by risk and attracted to the exotic but fearful of losing the social prerogatives that defined his place in the world." When King returned from his globetrotting expeditions and settled down in New York to enjoy his fame as the bestselling author of Mountaineering in the Sierra Nevada, he embarked on a romance with an African-American woman named Ada Copeland. A young nursemaid who moved north from Georgia in the mid-1880s, she apparently met King sometime in 1887 or early 1888 while he was out "slumming." That word, the author explains, denoted a class-crossing "fashionable amusement," according to the Saturday Evening Post. King was serious about his courtship of Copeland, but it was fraught with peril for all concerned, presenting threatening possibilities for blackmail on the one hand and abandonment on the other. He decided to present himself to her as a Pullman porter named James Todd, an invented identity that "hinged not just on one lie but a cluster of related, duplicitous assertions." As Sandweiss notes in this sturdy work, which blends elements of social and intellectual history with biography, thousands of light-skinned blacks in that era tried to pass for white, but the number of those who did the opposite must have been tiny. Yet King married Copeland and gave up his cherished social privileges. She had borne him five children, and he wason his deathbed in 1901, when he finally told her the truth. An intriguing look at long-held secrets, Jim Crow, bad faith-and also, as Sandweiss observes, "love and longing that transcends the historical bounds of time and place."
Columbia Journalism Review
[Sandweiss] tells [Clarence King’s story] with a scholar’s rigor and a storyteller’s verve…A sophisticated work of scholarship.”
Chicago Sun-Times
Fascinating.”
The New York Times
Ms. Sandweiss offers a fine, mesmerizing account.
AudioFile
Lorna Raver reads with enthusiasm and a deliberate delivery. There isn’t much opportunity for characterizations as Ada and Clarence/James don’t speak, but Raver makes sure you don’t miss a word of this well-researched story…A feel-good story well presented.”
New York Times
An astounding true story…Sandweiss offers a fine, mesmerizing account of how one extremely secretive man, ‘acting from a complicated mix of loyalty and self-interest, reckless desire and social conservatism,’ could encapsulate his country’s shifting ideas about race in the course of one family’s anything but black-and-white history.”
author of A Slave No More David W. Blight
"Passing Strange combines remarkable detective work, riveting storytelling, and the enduring question of race to fashion a most unusual but very American family saga.”
Washington Post
There was another side to King that neither the public nor his glittering friends knew, a side that Martha A. Sandweiss explores with great sensitivity, insight, and painstaking research in Passing Strange…[an] immensely fascinating work.”
From the Publisher
"Ms. Sandweiss offers a fine, mesmerizing account." ---The New York Times
