Quick Take
- Voice: David Drummond is the only credited voice on a Tantor Audio production, one reader across a book that braids memoir, archive, and reportage.
- Big ideas: Slavery and its inheritance, family myth against the documented record, race in Texas, two families and one surname
- Atmosphere: Patient, documentary, and unsparing
- Worth it?: Thorough long before it is propulsive, and worth the length if you want one place followed all the way through.
Two families share a surname because one of them once owned the other, and both of them come from the same hill in Falls County, Texas. Chris Tomlinson, a journalist raised on stories that flattered his White ancestors, went looking for what actually happened, and the audiobook that resulted runs nearly fourteen hours across a century and a half. David Drummond reads it. The span covers 1854 to 2007, and nothing in between has been softened for the benefit of the family that handed down the story.
One Piece of Land, Radically Different Lives
Falls County is the entire world of this book, and that is a structural decision worth appreciating. National histories of slavery and its aftermath tend to skip between examples; Tomlinson stays on one piece of land from the arrival of the first Tomlinson, a White woman, in 1854 to the departure of the last, LaDainian's father, in 2007. Continuity of place is what makes the argument work, because the same ground keeps producing radically different lives.
Bob Hillier, in an August 2014 response, gives the fullest account of the method: an immense variety of documents mined for objective history, set beside the author's own life story and the story of the Black family carrying the same name. That response also singles out a theory the book builds about the connections between power and bigotry, drawn from years of reporting on conflict abroad. It is the most analytical thing anyone on this page has written.
Chris Tomlinson's other career is the reason this never settles into a genealogy project. Years spent covering racial and ethnic violence in other countries gave him a framework for what he found at home, and the book keeps pressing toward a general claim about power rather than resting on a family story. Whether that generalization holds is arguable. The attempt is what raises this above the memoirs it superficially resembles.
Drummond Alone for a Story He's Implicated In
Drummond is the sole reader credited, and one voice suits a book that keeps switching between two families, an archive, and a reporter's memoir. A cast would sort those strands by timbre and make the listening easier. It would also destroy the effect, because the whole point is that all of it is one story, told by one person who is implicated in the outcome.
Genealogy is rarely compelling, and the reason this one is comes down to a single line in the description: a grandfather's claim that the family's slaves loved them so much they took the Tomlinson name for their own. That sentence is the engine of the book. Everything after it is an investigation into what a family tells itself, and how long a comfortable story survives contact with the documents.
LaDainian Tomlinson supplies the second center, and the description's account of him is the most quietly devastating thing on this listing: a child playing on land his Black ancestors worked as slaves, believing the Hill was named for his own family, until he was old enough to read a historical plaque and learn otherwise. George C. Moore, who graded it at five stars, frames the project as an attempt to mitigate a family's prior behavior, which is a fair and slightly severe reading of it.
Thorough Well Before It Is Ever Propulsive
Subtitles matter when they carry the thesis, and this one has gone astray. The book's subtitle, about the remarkable story of two families who share the Tomlinson name, one White and one Black, appears nowhere in the title as listed, which reads Tomlinson Hill and simply stops. Anyone scanning search results meets a place name with no indication of the subject, which is an odd way to sell a book whose entire premise fits into one line.
Nobody who wrote in describes the recording. Five written responses sit on this page and not one mentions Drummond, the pacing, or what it is like to take this in by ear rather than by eye. Two were posted in the summer of 2014, before the audio edition existed at all, and one from August 2016 consists entirely of a note that the item has arrived and a promise to review the remarkable story once it has been read. That one carries five stars.
An enthusiastic pool has exactly one dissenter, and the dissent is the most informative thing on the page. Somebody gave it four stars in May 2015, listed everything learned along the way, slavery, Civil War era farming, the treatment of freed people afterward, Texas civil rights and integration, then withheld the fifth star on the grounds that the book failed a reading enjoyment test and felt like work. That is an honest warning about register. This is thorough well before it is propulsive.
Give It the Full Run or Nothing
Texans, and anyone carrying a family story nobody has ever checked, are who this was written for. Karen Meredith, in a November 2014 response, describes arriving expecting another book about how bad America was and leaving with a sense that both families had given something valuable away. That trajectory, resistance turning into gratitude, is probably the common experience, which is why the book lands harder than a straightforwardly accusatory one would.
Sports listeners drawn here by a famous running back's name should recalibrate before buying. The football career is context rather than content, and LaDainian Tomlinson appears as a descendant rather than as a subject. Anyone hoping for a sports biography will spend most of fourteen hours among nineteenth-century land records and twentieth-century Texas politics instead, which is a fine way to spend them and not the way that was expected.
History this local rarely gets told at this length, and the length is precisely what makes it work: the century and a half between 1854 and 2007 followed without shortcuts, until the family myth has nowhere left to stand. The reporting is patient, the sourcing is heavy, and the payoff accumulates rather than arrives. Give it the full run or give it nothing.
Does the audiobook cover the whole span from 1854 to 2007?
Yes, and that continuity is the structure rather than a framing device. The narrative opens when the first Tomlinson, a White woman, reaches Falls County and closes when the last one leaves in 2007. Expect a substantial stretch of nineteenth-century land and labor before the twentieth century arrives at all.
Is the audiobook hard going?
It can be. The one dissenting response on the page withholds a star because the book felt like work rather than pleasure, and at nearly fourteen hours of land records, farming, civil rights, and family history that is a fair description of the pace. It rewards patience without ever supplying momentum.
Does it deal with the Civil War and what came afterward?
Yes to both. Civil War era farming turns up alongside the treatment of freed people once slavery ended, and the later fight over Texas civil rights and integration follows. The book moves through all of it as it touches this specific piece of ground rather than as national set pieces, which keeps a familiar chronology feeling particular.
