A Boy from Georgia: Coming of Age in the Segregated South

Hamilton Jordan, former chief of staff for President Carter, died in 2008; he had worked on his memoir for a decade, but it took a determined effort by his daughter, Kathleen, to finish the project. Jordan traces his Georgia childhood in the segregated South of the 1950s and '60s, splendidly describing a life molded by Confederate values and military tradition. In Albany, Ga., "the breadbasket of the Confederacy," the Jordan clan put down roots and raised three children with a legacy of hard work and white privilege. As Jordan moves through youth, he begins to question the bitter formula of race and segregation, writing eloquently about realizing "the many ironies and injustices of the system," but like almost all Southern whites, he accepted that system. After being a staffer for the powerful segregationist senator Richard B. Russell and witnessing the tense 1962 Albany protests with Martin Luther King Jr., he went against tradition to act as strategist for Carter's Georgia gubernatorial victory at age 26, and later served as Carter's key aide in the White House. While Jordan's book comes to a rushed, unsatisfying end in the middle of the Carter era, it's still a fine glimpse into the evolution in Washington political history. (Oct.)