Despite their book's sensational title, historians and coauthors Ned (The World That Made New Orleans) and Constance Sublette offer a serious, if also sprawling and passionate, history on the ways slavery made men rich and drove the United States toward civil war. Spanning the colonial period through the collapse of the Confederacy, the authors recount the uses and abuses of slavery as a form of labor but also as a type of exchange, credit, and collateral. The ultimate wealth of slavery, they argue, was in enslaved women's bodies, for slaveholders calculated the buying and selling of people on their capacity to reproduce. The domestic slave trade provided a large and expanding market, and slaveholders capitalized on the demands for labor in the cotton-growing Gulf South by exporting slaves southward and westward in what became a second Middle Passage. VERDICT Scholars will not find much new in this book and will be troubled by a number of errors in fact and emphasis as well as the authors' gratuitous and distracting asides. Still, readers will profit from the extensive survey of "slave breeding" that should remind them that, at its core, American slavery prospered as a violent business with little conscience and brought riches to planters and misery to the enslaved.—Randall M. Miller, St. Joseph's Univ., Philadelphia