Synopses & Reviews
Landon Carter, a Virginia planter patriarch, left behind one of the most revealing of all American diaries. In this astonishingly rich biography, Rhys Isaac mines this remarkable document and many other sources to reconstruct Carter's interior world as it plunged into revolution.
The aging patriarch, though a fierce supporter of American Liberty, was deeply troubled by the rebellion and its threat to established order. His diary, originally a record of plantation business, began to fill with angry stories of revolt in his own little kingdom. Carter writes at a white heat, his words sputtering from his pen as he documents the terrible rupture that the Revolution meant to him.
Indeed, Carter felt in his heart he was chronicling a world in decline, the passing of the order that his revered father had bequeathed to him. Not only had Landon's king betrayed his subjects, but Landon's own household betrayed him: his son showed insolent defiance, his daughter Judith eloped with a forbidden suitor, all of his slaves conspired constantly, and eight of them made an armed exodus to freedom. The seismic upheaval he helped to start had crumbled the foundations of Carter's own home.
Like Laurel Ulrich in her classic A Midwife's Tale, Rhys Isaac here unfolds not just the life, but the mental world of our countrymen in a long-distant time. Moreover in this presentation of Landon Carter's passionate narratives, the diarist becomes an arresting new character in the world's literature; a figure of Shakespearean proportions, the Lear of his own tragic kingdom. This long-awaited work will be seen both as a major contribution to Revolution history and a triumph of the art of biography.
Review
"Poignant documents on the collapse of an old world, mixed with learned commentary: an outstanding work of history....An extraordinary, fascinating set of firsthand accounts from the revolutionary era." Kirkus Reviews
Review
"Readers will be fascinated by Carter's impassioned narratives, masterfully placed in their time by Isaac's brilliant analysis. This admirable study joins Claire Tomalin's Samuel Pepys as an example of the finest scholarly analysis of personal diaries." Library Journal
Review
"Isaac who in his first book, The Transformation of Virginia, 1740-1790, inventively adopted anthropological methods and approaches to examine the social, cultural, and political impact of evangelical Christianity on the colony is a sensitive guide to Carter's world, and reading his systematic exploration is the only way for the layman to comprehend the diaries properly....Alas, though, the vagueness, pomposity, and self-consciously literary style that marred The Transformation of Virginia often render this book puzzling and highly annoying..." Benjamin Schwarz, The Atlantic Monthly (read the entire Atlantic Monthly review)
About the Author
"In Isaac's hands the story of the Revolution in a small corner of Virginia breaks into multiple competing narratives that reveal the rich interplay between the local and the Atlantic, between the personal and the political, and, above all, between lost stories told by subalterns and the recorded stories of a patriarch-master."--James Sidbury, The Journal of Southern History