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The Year Of Birmingham, 1963, was a cataclysmic turning point in America's long civil rights struggle. That spring, child demonstrators faced down police dogs and fire hoses in huge nonviolent marches for desegregation. A few months later, Ku Klux Klansmen retaliated by bombing the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church and killing four young black girls. Diane McWhorter, journalist and daughter of a prominent Birmingham family, weaves together police and FBI documents, interviews with black activists and former Klansmen, and personal memories into an extraordinary narrative of the city, the personalities, and events that brought about America's second emancipation.
"The Year of Birmingham," 1963, was a cataclysmic turning point in America's long civil rights struggle. That spring, child demonstrators faced down police dogs and fire hoses in huge nonviolent marches for desegregation. A few months later, Ku Klux Klansmen retaliated by bombing the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church and killing four young black girls. Diane McWhorter, journalist and daughter of a prominent Birmingham family, weaves together police and FBI documents, interviews with black activists and former Klansmen, and personal memories into an extraordinary narrative of the city, the personalities, and the events that brought about America's second emancipation.
Jon WienerThe NationThe most important book on the movement since Taylor Branch's Parting the Waters. It should become a classic.
David Herbert DonaldAuthor of LincolnA tour de force, comparable in importance to J. Anthony Lukas's Common Ground and Taylor Branch's Parting the Waters. Carry Me Home is destined to become a classic in the history of the civil rights revolution.
Francine ProseO MagazineHer narrative takes on the suspense of a detective novel....Carry Me Home is an ambitious, panoramic history with enough personal memoir to make us see why Diane McWhorter cannot forget -- and wants us to remember -- the momentous events that took place during one historic year in one Alabama city.
The Washington Post Book WorldCarry Me Home is a case study in how the privileged and powerful can operate behind the scenes to control and, when it is in their interests, undermine and corrupt the social fabric.
The New YorkerMcWhorter's own involvement in the story...reenergizes the struggle, serving as a reminder that history is always personal.
Publishers Weekly (starred)The story of civil rights in Birmingham, Alabama, has been told before -- from the unspeakable violence to the simple, courageous decencies -- but fresh, sometimes startling details distinguish this doorstop page-turner told by a daughter of the city's white elite. [McWhorter] brings a gripping pace and an unusual, twofold perspective to her account, incorporating her viewpoint as a child...as well as her adult viewpoint as an avid scholar and journalist.
Paul RosenbergThe Denver PostMcWhorter's remarkable clarity and candor, her relentless focus on the enormous forces of stasis, reaction and accommodation that defined life in Birmingham, illuminate this past so vividly we cannot avoid the unspoken challenge to finally come to terms with it, however difficult that may yet be.Paul Rosenberg
Harper BarnesSt. Louis Post-DispatchDiane McWhorter's powerful moral epic about the civil rights movement in Birmingham, Alabama, contains all the elements of first-rate history, including dauntingly thorough research, a sure grasp of the big picture as well as the tiny details that illuminate it, evocative writing that brings action and character springing off the page, and a novelist's sense of how to mold a compelling narrative arc out of the innumerable molecules of historical fact.
Ellen DahnkeThe TennesseanBirmingham's story will strike a chord with every Southerner who lived through that crucible, but it is as much a tribute to McWhorter's gifts that readers will feel as if they walk Birmingham's streets during that period as if through their own hometown.
Craig FlournoyThe Dallas Morning NewsThe product of nineteen years of research, Carry Me Home is a brilliant work of history.
Average Rating: 4.5 out of 5 stars(4.5 out of 5 stars)
1 of 1 Reviews Showing: 4.5 out of 5 stars
Reviewed by Mark (Farmington, New Mexico), May 17, 2003 The struggle for Civil Rights brings a new insight by McWhorter who grew up as an anglo in her city in the south. I feel she makes a great point of the men she writes about. What about anglo women in Birmingham during this time? I hope that those who do read the book will open their eyes and ears to the violent past of Birmingham.
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