Reviews

'South to America: A Journey Below the Mason Dixon to Understand the Soul of a Nation' by Imani Perry is the perfect blend of memoir and history book. It details the South in the United States through Perry's personal experiences as well as the wider history. Perry includes moments from her childhood and adult life that clearly show that she both loves the South while also grappling with its troubled history. In so doing, she expresses why the South is important, moments of community, and issues that persist.
The South is so often seen by those who do not live there as a stereotype. Perry deconstructs this by taking different cities throughout the South and exploring their own history as well as interjecting her personal narrative about that city.
I think this is a must read for everyone who lives in the United States, especially people like me who are not familiar with the South and only hear about it through stereotyped stories.

Content Warnings

jenniferlynnkrohn's review

Go to review page

challenging dark emotional informative reflective sad medium-paced

5.0

burntbmh's review

Go to review page

informative reflective

3.0

While reading I kept thinking, this would be great as an audiobook. Unfortunately, the audiobook takes something like sixteen hours to finish. This was my school's community read and Perry gave a talk on campus. Her lecture really was like a chapter out of the book. The book feels like a conversation; although organized by geographical location, Perry meanders a lot within each chapter. Each chapter's theme, while constructed from stories revolving around that place, doesn't apply only to that place. She sometimes connects herself to a location through a family relation who otherwise has no bearing in the book. I liked the highly personal Birmingham chapter, but she also slips in many irrelevant personal asides. I would have enjoyed learning more about her parent's relationships with fellow activists and her childhood, not long treatises on the white people who are probably making racist assumptions about her. I found her research on personal genealogy and the way she traced academic and geographical geneaology interesting, but the book's structure made this an incredibly long read.

I figured out my central problem with this book on page 353. How does the book manage to be so personal yet does not reckon with the issue of wealth until then? Does the wealth we have now not divorce us from the oppression of our ancestors?

kurt_von_nugget's review

Go to review page

challenging informative sad tense fast-paced

4.75

More...