Customer Reviews

Call To Home: African-Americans Reclaim The Rural South

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Having read this book a few years ago for an Anthropology course, it's remained on my mind and influenced my thinking about the Industrial North, making me wonder if slavery ever truly ended. Seems to me it mostly just changed forms (or went overseas) and the exploitative nature of producing cheap goods continued. This book points to that, told from the African American perspective over the last century. I find it interesting a greater sense of community would be found down South, my own homeland, racially-divided as it is.

This book gave me plenty to think on, and I hope to reread it eventually.

Considering relocating out of the Los Angeles area, I read this book and felt drawn to move down south. Being raised in New York City and living in California for 15 years I did have my reservations. But since we moved to Raleigh, NC not only have I had no regrets, I'm now a Realtor helping other African American's relocate to the area.

"Call to Home" tells the untold story of the remigration of African Americans back to the South. The book is written as an ethnography in a novelistic fashion. The stories told give fantastic insight into the motivation and attitudes compelling these individuals to move back "home". Rather than for economic reasons, Stack posits that the nostalgia of home and the love of family drive these African Americans back South.

Unfortunately the stories in the book portray the men as less sentimental and as caring less for their homelands. If Stack found that this was indeed the case she ought to have postulated why. Instead the reader is left wondering if this is indeed the case or is Stacks viewpoint is somewhat slanted. (I might point out that she is a professor of Women's Studies at Berkeley). Overall, the book was very enlightening and a pleasant read.

This book was assigned to me as a reading for a book review in my cultural anthropology class at Mississippi State University. I thought that this book was a difficult one to read because the layout was hard to follow. The names began to get jumbled by the fourth chapter. The story line could be good if it was brought to the audience in a more typical and easy to read format. Less rambling on and on would be great. I have never read a book that took half a page to describe a creek...it would have been ok if the book was about the stream but it wasn't it was about like 50 people and eachof their life stories...It stunk!!