Appalachia

The book as a whole deserves all the rapturous reviews it got for tracing three different families in which ancestors passed the invisible line from black to white at one or multiple points in history. Ohio is the setting for one of these family stories, the Deep South for another, the Kentucky/Virginia border region for the third. A lawsuit in southwest Virginia between the Spencer and Looney families opens up an amazing insight into the politics and legalities of racial identity around the turn of the century.

Spoiler alert, the eastern Kentucky community of the Spencer family rallies to its support when the Virginia legal case pulls them in as witnesses-- it's a heartwarming story. Sharfstein is both an engaging historian and a law school professor so he makes all the developments of the case really interesting and comprehensible. Years before the book, he wrote an essay about the Spencer case that is accessible online at the Yale Law School Review here.