I have often sensed that the amazingly popular American frontier romances of the 1820's were a particularly salient cultural–literary form, and Ezra Tawil's study explains why. Through a series of deft critical moves and perceptive readings, Tawil shows how these canonical fictions not only “helped to redefine ‘race’ for an emerging national culture” but did so in a compelling way by “defining the realm of feeling as the most important locus of racial difference,” thereby producing the “racial sentiment” of the study's title (2). In his introduction and first chapter, Tawil marshals a persuasive array of “scientific” and cultural sources to support his argument for a shift in racial ideology that distinguishes Enlightenment beliefs in a common human condition from later sentimentalized and essentialized notions of “race.” Before the late eighteenth century, thinkers held to the idea of monogenesis (human descent from a common origin), and that physical and external human differences were produced by geography and climate, while later notions were anchored in a doctrine of polygenesis (human descent from multiple and distinct origins) which located differences as interior and psychological – a matter of stable essences not mutable circumstances. Thus geographical and cultural terms like “Indian,” “African,” and “Anglo-American” give way to markers like “red,” “black,” and “white” that continue to define and distort our notions of difference. From this paradigm, Tawil reads canonical frontier romances by James Fenimore Cooper, Lydia Maria Child, and Catharine Sedgwick and slavery novels by Harriet Stowe and Herman Melville in ways that are often, in his words, “counterintuitive” and yet deeply revealing of the disturbing rhetorical imbrication of benevolence and racialism, even racism. For example, Tawil argues that the largely unexamined coupling of aggressivity and racism prevents us from apprehending the “racial sentiment” of the domestic romances and novels written by women which critics often consider progressive alternatives to the retrograde masculine romances of Cooper. His analysis of Stowe's appropriation and extension of the racial logic of these frontier fictions, especially in the figure of the “vanishing ‘negro’” who like Hobomock and Magawisca even articulate the necessity of exile from the now white Anglo-Saxon social body, is chilling and instructive. This prompts Tawil to read Melville's presentation of Captain Delano in Benito Cereno as a trenchant critique of Stowe's benevolent racialism. Although Tawil's interpretive acumen sometimes stretches his paradigm to encompass even the most resistant textual moments, finally I thoroughly applaud his broader theoretical claim: that the fictional handling of the “Indian question” prefigured the “slave question” and did not merely reflect trends emerging in the scientific discourses but was, in fact, “an important cultural site of racial formation as much as racial representation.” In other words, this most American of American literature was absolutely crucial in the modern “making of race” (8).