Product Details
Simon & Schuster, January 2002
Trade Paperback, 720 pages
ISBN-10: 0743217721
ISBN-13: 9780743217729
Awards and Nominations
- Pulitzer Prize
Description
"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.
Bruce ClaytonPittsburgh Post-GazetteA stunningly provocative and vividly written history.
Kirkus Reviews (starred)A vivid, admirably nuanced, and wide-ranging history of the city that became ground zero in the civil rights struggle...dense, detailed, and insightful.
Jim LynchMilwaukee Journal SentinelAmerica gets a thoughtful dissection of one of the most turbulent periods in its history.
Kate CallenSan Diego Union-TribuneCarry Me Home is a staggering book...a twentieth century Iliad.
James A. MillerThe Boston GlobeCarry Me Home reads like a detective story as McWhorter relentlessly pursues her prey....A powerful memoir and an absorbing social history, Carry Me Home belongs with Taylor Branch's Parting the Waters and Howell Raines's My Soul Is Rested.
Ruth RosenLos Angeles TimesPowerfully written, vividly recounted, McWhorter's intimate yet magisterial narrative adds important insights to our understanding of the Ku Klux Klan and its connections with official power in the South.
Troy PattersonEntertainment WeeklyThe force of Carry Me Home comes from the scope of the author's reporting....She sketches the players in bold strokes and summons her themes with light ones, shaping the story of Birmingham into a lucid, elucidating drama about democracy.
Lauren F. WinnerNewsdayImpeccable history...in the polished prose of a novelist...A terrifically brave book.
ElleImpressive...gutsy.
Jack E. WhiteTimeNo current book...delves more deeply into the nuances of the movement era than Diane McWhorter's Carry Me Home.
David ShiplerThe New York Times Book ReviewAn exhaustive journey through both the segregationist and integrationist sides of Birmingham's struggle...[McWhorter] contributes significantly to the historical record.
Harry BauldPeopleThis epic of reportage and history about Birmingham, Alabama, in the early '60s reads like a big ambitious novel....McWhorter's complex narrative roves skillfully forward and backward...the cast is huge and vivid, the story brimming with courage, drama, villains and heroes. The War and Peace of the civil rights movement.
