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Named a best book of the summer by Literary Hub The life and times of a militant white supremacist, written by one of his offspring, National Book Award-winner Edward Ball Life of a Klansman tells the story of a warrior in the Ku Klux Klan, a carpenter in Louisiana who took up the cause of fanatical racism during the years after the Civil War. Edward Ball, a descendant of the Klansman, paints a portrait of his familys anti-Black militant that is part history, part memoir rich in personal detail. Sifting through family lore about "our Klansman" as well as public and private records, Ball reconstructs the story of his great-great grandfather, Constant Lecorgne. A White French Creole, father of five, and working class ship carpenter, Lecorgne had a career in white terror of notable and bloody completeness: Massacres, night riding, masked marches, street rampages - all part of a tireless effort that he and other Klansmen made to restore white power when it was threatened by the emancipation of four million enslaved African Americans. To offer a non-White view of the Ku-klux, Ball seeks out descendants of African Americans who were once victimized by "our Klansman" and his comrades, and shares their stories. For Whites, to have a Klansman in the family tree is no rare thing: Demographic estimates suggest that 50 percent of Whites in the United States have at least one ancestor who belonged to the Ku Klux Klan at some point in its history. That is, one-half of White Americans could write a Klan family memoir, if they wished. In an era when racist ideology and violence are again loose in the public square, Life of a Klansman offers a personal origin story of white supremacy. Balls family memoir traces the vines that have grown from militant roots in the Old South into the bitter fruit of the present, when whiteness is again a cause that can veer into hate and domestic terror. An NPR Best Book of the Year - 2020 Kirkus Reviews Best Books of the Year - 2020 A Macmillan Audio production from Farrar, Straus and Giroux PLEASE NOTE: When you purchase this title, the accompanying PDF will be available in your Audible Library along with the audio. Read more REVIEW "Taking the reader along with him on a journey of discovery as he teases out facts, [Edward Ball] engages in speculation and shares his emotions about the sad saga of Constant Lecorgne, an unsuccessful carpenter and embittered racist who was a great-great-grandfather on his mothers side. The result is 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." -- Walter Isaacson, The New York Times Book Review "[Life of a Klansman] is brave, revealing and intimate, as well as an exploration of how one familys morally complicated past echoes down to the present. This is a story for our cultural moment, as Americans begin to engage with and acknowledge the ways that white supremacy endures in our society . . . Ball is movingly philosophical about what responsibility his generation holds for the sins of its fathers." -- W. Ralph Eubanks, The Wall Street Journal "Balls use of the historical present not only illuminates a Klansmans thinking but lends an immediacy to the writing . . . Ball writes with great sensitivity about the black victims of appalling atrocities such as the massacre in New Orleans on July 30, 1866 . . . Balls writing is suffused with a generosity of spirit; it has an unusually clear-eyed and quiet quality that often defies the tumult that it is depicting. His humility is palpable as he searches for and interviews descendants of some of those injured or killed in the atrocities that Constant likely took part in." -- Colin Grant, The New York Review of Books "Ball tells his story with curiosity, disgust, and a sweeping lamp of novelistic imagination, making his tale all the chillier for being so intimate, so intensely realized . . . This is an important work of Americas collective history -- one whose ghosts are most undead." -- John Freeman, Literary Hub "In writing a microhistory about [his great-great-grandfather], [Ball] builds a psychological portrait of white supremacy, which then radiates outward and across time, to explain the motives and historical background behind racist violence . . . Ball offers a particularly piercing psychoanalytic reading of the present, even though his subject is the past." -- Josephine Livingstone, The New Republic "Captivating . . . An intimate origin story of the white-supremacist movement . . . [Edward Ball] reconstructs his ancestors world and moral insight in a work of novelistic expansiveness . . . Ball refuses to disown the past, believing it crucial for white Americans to acknowledge that marauders like Constant are our people, and they fight for us. Accordingly, he approaches his ancestors story with shame, but also sympathy and imagination." -- Julian Lucas, Harpers "Edward Balls Life of a Klansman is filled with life stories that could have come from William Faulkners pen." -- Nathan M. Greenfield, Times Literary Supplement "Balls direct but nimble prose cuts the contours of Constant Lecorgnes life and grapples simultaneously with the coherent outline and structure that whiteness imposes . . . Though he claims Life of a Klansman is an investigation of his matrilineal ancestor, Ball has engineered another kind of coup: a public reckoning with white supremacy . . . Balls book is about the postbellum US and the US in 2020; its looking both directions at once." -- Walton Muyumba, The Boston Globe "In [our] severe but potentially transformative times, 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 l