Book of the week: The New Mind of the South by Tracy Thompson

(Simon & Schuster, $26)

Tracy Thompson could hardly have avoided the moral complexities of the American South, said Mythili Rao in TheDailyBeast.com. The future journalist grew up in 1950s Atlanta across from a stretch of railroad that had been destroyed in Sherman’s March. In school, she learned that the Confederacy had fought the Civil War over states’ rights, then watched the violent resistance to the civil-rights movement as it unfolded on TV. So when Thompson reached adulthood and joined the newspaper business, “it was only a matter of time until her need for deeper answers caught up with her.” Seeking to better understand her native region, Thompson has traveled through several states to interview Southerners of all stripes. Her “clear-eyed, deeply considered” regional portrait could launch a new dialogue about where Southern culture can and should be heading.

“Whatever you think the South represents, it is Tracy Thompson’s contention that it’s morphing into something else,” said Conrad Bibens in the Houston Chronicle. The African-American and Hispanic shares of the region’s population are growing—as black Northerners migrate south and Mexicans cross the border seeking opportunity. But Thompson fears that the so-called New South can’t reach its potential until it confronts what she calls “the Big Lie.” Contrary to what she was taught in school, the conflict that tore apart the nation in the 1860s wasn’t the War of Northern Aggression, a battle in which slavery was a side issue. “To her, the war was all about slavery, and the good guys won.” Southerners who tell themselves otherwise, she says, end up so conflicted that they compensate by demonizing Washington and fetishizing their own religiosity, courtesy, and connection to the land.

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“A Yankee couldn’t get away with this book,” said J. Bryan Lowder in Slate.com. But Thompson clearly appreciates that we modern Southerners are “a capable, adaptable people.” She “tempers her chastisements” with both “a weary strain of compassion” and optimism about the future. Most Southerners “love our families and close friends fiercely—these days, whatever color they are”—yet we tend to think too small to address the issues of racial inequality and poverty that hold back cities like Thompson’s Atlanta. If we could look at our past and even our present more honestly, perhaps the South could “not merely rise again, but truly bloom.”