In this social chronicle of the American South's past 40 years, Wilkie (coauthor, Arkansas Mischief), a native Mississippian who exiled himself, proves that, indeed, you can't take the South out of the boy. Drawing on his own memories and dozens of books and magazine articles, Wilkie retells the big stories he covered as a journalist, most notably for the Boston Globe: Ole Miss's forced acceptance of its first black student in 1962; "Freedom Summer" of 1964, "the most terrible year of violence since the Civil War"; Nixon's Southern Strategy to wrestle the Southern vote from the Democrats; the election of Jimmy Carter; the conviction of Medgar Evers's murderer in 1994, 31 years after the crime. But at the core of this book is Wilkie's own development in the face of enormous changes. Raised as someone "who observed segregationist customs, but disapproved of blatant bigotry," Wilkie becomes appalled by the South's racism. In 1969, he flees Mississippi for the cultivated Northeast he'd read about in Cheever and Updike novels, planning never to return. Of course, he discovers New England has its own problems, like the controversial student busing program in 1975 Boston. After 25 years, Wilkie moves southward again and finds it, like himself, changed yet unchanged. "My generation experienced more disruption in our social order than any other.... Yet we maintained our own culture, our accent, our cuisine, our music as if should we give them up we would finally admit defeat." Wilkie's candid analyses and self-examination lift this book above a mere rehashing of the times. (Oct.)
