Reviews

National Book Award Shortlist Read: In the past year, I feel like I’ve read three variations of the same book: “Robert E. Lee and Me: A Southerner's Reckoning with the Myth of the Lost Cause” by Ty Seidule, “How the Word Is Passed: A Reckoning with the History of Slavery Across America” by Clint Smith, and this book, “South to America: A Journey Below the Mason-Dixon to understand the Soul of a Nation” by Imani Perry. All three are travel memoirs by academics who grew up in the South. Seidule limits his book to locations where he has lived and focuses on the Lost Cause Myth. Clint Smith selects locations throughout the South which play key roles in the history of slavery. Imani Perry’s is the most ambitious of the three: she writes about dozens of locations throughout the South and primarily speaks to race issues, but also to the Dollar Tree, Outkast, mobile homes, Flannery O’Connor, scuppernongs, W.E.B DuBois, Disney World, and the Pulse nightclub shooting, among dozens of other issues.

While reading this book, it won the National Book Award for Non-Fiction. As previously mentioned, it is an ambitious book. That being said, it wasn’t a five-star read for me. It was dense. It was detailed. It was written in a flowing style that drifted from one topic to another to another without clear demarcation. It definitely has important things to say . . . but I feel like other contemporary books have already covered so much of the same ground.

While this is a minor factual error, one error got under the skin of this Georgia Studies teacher. On pp. 270-271, Perry says, “Eight hundred men from what is now Haiti alongside three thousand Frenchmen joined the five hundred American troops at the Battle of Savannah in 1779, allowing the American to take back their city.” This couldn’t be further from the truth! The Patriots and Haitians laid siege to Savannah, but utterly failed! The Patriots has eight times the number of casualties and never reclaimed the city!