The New Mind of the South [Paperback]

In this “knowing and sensitive book” (Walter Isaacson, author ofSteve Jobs), Pulitzer Prize–finalist Tracy Thompson upends stereotypes and fallacies to reveal the true heart of the American South today.

Investigative journalist Tracy Thompson spent years traveling throughout the South and discovered a place both amazingly similar to and radically different from the land she knew as a child. African Americans who left en masse for much of the twentieth century are returning in huge numbers, drawn back by a mix of ambition, family ties, and cultural memory. Though Southerners remain more churchgoing than other Americans, the evan­gelical Protestantism that defined Southern culture through the 1960s has been torn by bitter ideological schisms. Drawing on mountains of data, interviews, and a whole new set of historic archives, Thompson reveals the true character of a region still misunderstood by outsiders and even by its own people.“Thompson, a writer who lopes easily from the dispensing of statistics to shoe-leather reporting to touching autobiography to impressive flights of moral reflection, makes an ideal guide to this landscape….For this outsider it offered illumination on every page.”“[Thompson] displays a splendid cynicism toward establishment politicians of all kinds, and her passion for the truth about forgotten wrongs will inspire all but the most hidebound Southerner.”“[An] able blend of reportage, travelogue, and memoir….The New Mind of the Southis a lucid and inspired endeavor that gracefully handles the Southern paradoxes and polishes away rusted typecasts.” [B]rilliant. . . . On this diagnostic tour of the South's kudzu-lined highways, Thompson's cartographic eye is keen. . . . Southern roads, Thompson shows us, are haunted by the heat shimmers of the past and potholed by uncertainties in the present-and we must grapple with both if we're ever going to get lĂ3