![]() It must be said that this work, though sometimes uneven, is an essential meditation on the South, its relationship to American culture - even Americanness itself. It is inevitable, though, that all sites will not receive equal care and attention - and clearly her loyalty is to Alabama. Equally moving are the dispatches from her mother’s native Louisiana. Her portraits of her grandmother combine elegiac longing and the rigor of a historian setting the record straight. Her tone grows tender as she recalls her dancing cousins or the foot-washing Baptists. And she does not flinch when documenting the consequences. ![]() At each stop, she recounts an atrocity, but also resistance. Perry travels to over a dozen Southern cities and towns, excavating both histories and modern realities. Any attempt to classify this ambitious work, which straddles genre, kicks down the fourth wall, dances with poetry, engages with literary criticism and flits from journalism to memoir to academic writing - well, that’s a fool’s errand and only undermines this insightful, ambitious and moving project. ![]() Scrupulously researched and teeming with facts and citations. ![]()
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