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by Tracy Thompson
This ground-breaking, thought-provoking exploration upends stereotypes and fallacies to reveal the true heart of the South today - a region still misunderstood by outsiders and even by its own society.
Many observers say that "the South" has disappeared. Tracy Thompson, a Georgia native, asserts that it has merely drawn on its oldest tradition: an ability to adapt and transform itself.
Thompson spent four years traveling throughout the region and discovered a South both amazingly similar and radically different from the land she knew as a child. African Americans who left en masse for much of the twentieth century are returning in huge numbers, drawn back by a mix of ambition, family ties, and cultural memory. Though Southerners remain more churchgoing than other Americans, the evangelical Protestantism that defined Southern culture up through the 1960s has been torn by bitter ideological schisms. The new South is ahead of others in absorbing waves of Latino immigrants, in rediscovering its agrarian traditions, in seeking racial reconciliation, and in reinventing what it means to have roots in an increasingly rootless global culture.
Drawing on mountains of data, interviews, and a whole new set of historic archives, Thompson paints a heartening, often surprising picture of a region filled with promise and paradoxes - one that is laying a path for the rest of the nation to follow.
"Starred Review. The result is a nuanced - and sometimes astringently humorous - portrait of a multifaceted, often misunderstood region that overturns stereotypes." - Publishers Weekly
"A well-considered, well-written appraisal of a region that is more complicated than many readers realize." - Kirkus
"The more that's written about the American South - as a region and as a mindset - the more confused people seem to be. Tracy Thompson helps clear up the myths and the outdated stereotypes. She correctly portrays the South and its people not as stubborn but as always changing. This is a knowing and sensitive book." - Walter Isaacson author of Steve Jobs and Benjamin Franklin
"Tracy Thompson's valuable book brings into modern times the search for Southern identity undertaken seventy years ago by W.J. Cash. With clear-eyed reporting, she shows us the multi-ethnic and more individualistic South that is emerging from the still-powerful matrix of black-white race relations, religion, and one-party politics. She argues that there is a newer New South of demographic diversity, and this book makes an impressive stride toward a fresh Southern sociology needed to carry students of the region beyond the familiar labels of Bible Belt and Sun Belt." - Howell Raines author of My Soul Is Rested
This information about The New Mind of the South was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Tracy Thompson is a reporter and essayist who has written about subjects ranging from psychiatry to law to the Civil War. She is the author of The Beast: A Reckoning with Depression and The Ghost in the House. She lives just outside Washington, D.C., with her husband, their two daughters, one tabby cat, and an enthusiastic beagle named Max.
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