Thank you, The New Press, for providing this book for review consideration via NetGalley in exchange for an honest review. All opinions are my own.

Mr. Book just finished The Price They Paid: Slavery, Shipwrecks and Reparations Before the Civil War, by Jeff Forret.

This book will be released on November 19, 2024.

This book is about four different incidents in which slave ships became shipwrecked while the slaves were being delivered to the United States. In each case, the ship’s owners, financiers of the venture and/or slave traders sued to get their “property” back and then when that wasn’t successful, they demanded reparations as compensation for the loss of their “property.” The United States government was involved in helping them to get their compensation. Government “officials actively and enthusiastically labored to subsidize them for their losses, not unlike the financial rescue of the banks deemed too big to fail during the Great Recession.”

This book was definitely thoroughly researched and is very detailed. Those are big strengths in any history book. But, where this book fell way short was in terms of being interesting. There were occassional interesting pages, but they were buried in a sea of uninteresting accounts and details.

I give this book a C. Goodreads and NetGalley require grades on a 1-5 star system. In my personal conversion system, a C equates to 2 stars. (A or A+: 5 stars, B+: 4 stars, B: 3 stars, C: 2 stars, D or F: 1 star).

This review has been posted at NetGalley, Goodreads and my blog, Mr. Book’s Book Reviews

Mr. Book finished reading this on September 22, 2024.