<p><I>Soul by Soul</I> tells the story of slavery in antebellum America by moving away from the cotton plantations and into the slave market itself the heart of the domestic slave trade. Taking us inside the New Orleans slave market the largest in the nation where 100000 men women and children were packaged priced and sold Walter Johnson transforms the statistics of this chilling trade into the human drama of traders buyers and slaves negotiating sales that would alter the life of each. What emerges is not only the brutal economics of trading but the vast and surprising interdependencies among the actors involved.</p>