David Thomas Konig is Professor of History and Professor of Law at Washington University in St. Louis
“Most Blessed of the Patriarchs” should be required reading for a general public that deserves more than easy evasions or tired indictments, for students who deserve an honest and unflinching engagement with the historical past, and for citizens seeking solutions for the problems of a troubled legacy.
Shuler wrote Thirteenth Turn, he tells us, to reveal the “still underdiscussed narrative of violence in American history,” which “includes both a kind of legal ‘justice,’ the death penalty, meted out by the state—with all the biases that kind of justice entails—as well as another, extralegal ‘justice,’ the democracy of the mob.”