Mr. Ball artfully reanimates ideas that attempted to justify slavery and, later, black subjugation.

... a haunting tapestry of interwoven stories that inform us not just about our past but about the resentment-bred demons that are all too present in our society today.

Life of a Klansman implicitly asks how White Americans can meaningfully confront their relationship to enduring white supremacy, whether they are directly tied to enslavers or terrorists, as Ball is, or linked less detectably by reaping the inescapable benefits of a deeply embedded racial privilege that is slavery’s lasting consequence.

... a book designed to discomfort its reader.

Ball cannot know Constant’s mind intimately. However, employing Saidiya Hartman’s technique, 'critical fabulation,' allows him creative liberties in constructing Constant’s life and his milieu. When gaps emerge in psychology, motive, or context, the author relies on the vast historical, literary, and artistic archives (family papers, public records, periodicals, photographs, and scholarship) about 19th-century white New Orleanian experience to speculate artistically about his ancestors.

Spanning most of the 19th century, Life of a Klansman is a nuanced case study of one cog within a machine of terrorism and oppression.

Ball writes predominantly in the present tense, making us feel the structural (and genetic) links between himself—the white writer—and Lecorgne, the white supremacist.

... exquisite research.

Ball reconstructs his ancestor’s world and moral insight in a work of novelistic expansiveness.

This is a timely book. It covers another period when America sought to confront its past and make amends for centuries of oppression of African-Americans.

...a powerful, horrifying history of a family and a nation.

... a book that is almost entirely historical context and speculation on the many reasons an ordinary French Creole white man would join the Klan and other racist organizations and participate in violence against newly empowered blacks after the Civil War (although to what extent he did, Ball can't really say).

... potent.

A violent legacy stirs a deep meditation on the nature of racism in this anguished study of Civil War–era New Orleans.