Bowie Enders
Upon reading the title of “For Adam’s Sake: A Family Saga in Colonial New England” I
anticipated this book to be about the life of a slave, but I was quite shocked to find that this book
doesn’t even really focus on slavery at all. It’s more inclined to families that were deeply affected
by the practice of slavery. Having set out to originally write a book about a New England diary,
Allegra Di Bonaventura was confronted with a troubling dilemma upon choosing Joshua
Hempstead. The issue was that at first she viewed Adam Jackson mainly through the narrow
prism of Joshua’s life. However, the more she read through the diary (started writing his diary in
1711, sixteen years before he purchased Adam Jackson in 1727.), the harder it became for her to
simply scan over the other man standing virtually across the table, with a family and problems of
his own. So Di Bonaventura made a decision to shift the focus of her book to a topic that would
