Passing Strange

<b>Read Martha A. Sandweiss's posts on the Penguin Blog</b> <p/><b> The secret double life of the man who mapped the American West and the woman he loved </b> <p/> Clarence King was a late nineteenth-century celebrity a brilliant scientist and explorer once described by Secretary of State John Hay as the best and brightest of his generation. But King hid a secret from his Gilded Age cohorts and prominent family in Newport: for thirteen years he lived a double life-the first as the prominent white geologist and writer Clarence King and a second as the black Pullman porter and steelworker named James Todd. The fair blue-eyed son of a wealthy China trader passed across the color line revealing his secret to his black common-law wife Ada Copeland only on his deathbed. In <i>Passing Strange</i> noted historian Martha A. Sandweiss tells the dramatic distinctively American tale of a family built along the fault lines of celebrity class and race- a story that spans the long century from Civil War to civil rights.