Professor Pascoe provides a sweeping historical and sociological review of America's laws against interracial marriage, their origins, and demise, focusing not just on Southern states' statutes targeting and limiting relationships of African Americans, but also the Western states' many laws targeting people of Chinese, Japanese, Filipino, and Hawaiian descent - with particular attention to the cultural attitudes that once sustained these laws.

Professor Pascoe is a careful scholar and a brilliant author, whose book represents academic historical writing at its very finest. She provides an extensively documented and objective yet gripping, indeed often moving, account - one that personalizes the effect of the laws explored on the lives of specific individuals who found themselves caught up in a legal system that denied legitimacy to their most important familial relationships.