About the Author

Clifton Crais is Professor of History and Director of the Institute of African Studies at Emory University, where he teaches courses on history, violence, and memory. He holds a doctorate from The Johns Hopkins University. He is the author of five books, including Sara Baartman and the Hottentot Venus, with Pamela Scully. He lives in Atlanta, Georgia.

Reviews

[P]oetic passages combine with Crais' impish humor to make reading History Lessons a weirdly pleasant sensation. . . .In History Lessons, there is no self-pity; no easy resolution . . . 'Forgetting is a necessary condition of living, ' he concedes, although, by serving history and the arts, we continue in the telling.

In this extraordinary work, Clifton Crais deploys his skills as a historian to attempt to overcome his amnesia concerning a traumatic childhood, plagued by an alcoholic mother and a largely neglectful father. His account of his journey into his personal past offers profound insights into the relationship between history and memory, interwoven with new understandings of how memory works, both neurologically and socially, derived from advances in the science of memory. Beautifully written, History Lessons offers valuable insights into the relationship between history and memory, a topic of enormous current controversy among historians. In addition to its contributions to this debate, it offers a highly readable and largely triumphant tale of a young boy who made his way in the world to become a major historian of the travails of others, using the memory of his own childhood wounds to arrive at a deeper understanding of the 'wounds of the past.'--Gabrielle M. Spiegel, Krieger-Eisenhower Professor of History, Johns Hopkins University

[P]acks an emotional wallop

A splendid book that bolsters a literary memoir with the neuroscience of memory, History Lessons beautifully evokes class, race, and loss in a way utterly nique to New Orleans.--Dan Baum, bestselling author of Nine Lives: Death and Life in New Orleans

Magnificent . . . A searing, deeply moving work.

This memoir of anguish and struggle is a story of remarkable strength and unlikely, inexplicable resilience.

Well-written and fascinating.