Mississippi

Raised in suburban Illinois in the 60s, a gifted student and athlete, Anthony Walton went on to Notre Dame and Brown into a career in journalism -- all the while convinced that racism, insofar as it still existed, was on the way out.  Covering the racial flash points in New York in the early 80s, though, led him to feel that racism was the marrow in the American bone, and getting worse all the time. Anthony finally realized this was a demon he had to stare in the face -- which, for...
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Raised in suburban Illinois in the 60s, a gifted student and athlete, Anthony Walton went on to Notre Dame and Brown into a career in journalism -- all the while convinced that racism, insofar as it still existed, was on the way out.  Covering the racial flash points in New York in the early 80s, though, led him to feel that racism was the marrow in the American bone, and getting worse all the time. Anthony finally realized this was a demon he had to stare in the face -- which, for him, meant going "home" to Mississippi, where his parents came from and, before his birth, escaped.  Still, childhood visits to relatives who stayed gave him the stuff of which nightmares are made.  Yet only by learning at last his own heritage could he discover his place and his country's nature. "Mississippi -- perhaps the most loaded proper noun in American English." What his journey covers is 200 years of history and a huge roster of famous writers, martyrs, bigots, planters and sharecroppers, bluesmen, aristocrats and plain folk, black and white together -- from those who made the history to those who inhabit it today. Neither travelogue nor lay history, neither memoir nor reportage, Mississippi is a powerful narrative that uses one place saturated in blood and lore -- what Southerners call "the South's South" -- to explore "the tragedies the past and our compulsions have visited upon us, all of us." A book of tremendous literary and social importance.