Customer Reviews

Power in the Blood: Land, Memory, and a Southern Family

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When John Bentley Mays returned to his southern roots, it was to attend to the affairs of a recently deceased aunt. While cleaning out her home, he found information on his ancestors that started him on a quest for family history. The story of the early Mays family settlers in the New World is very interesting.

I listened to this book on audio cassette. It probably would move along more pleasingly on paper because there were a few places when the author went off on philosophical rants that didn't move along the narrative so I would have liked those to go by a little more quickly, which I could not accomplish with audio. With a regular book I would have skimmed some of those discussions, but not all of them. Some were rather fascinating.

Mays is a good writer and those of us who are not from the Deep South can learn something of what it is to be from there. He had been embarrassed by his southern accent and worked to lose it as a young man. Some of his attitudes had become rather anti-southern. His research into his family and even his brief experiences as he arranged his aunt's affairs helped him to better understand the culture that he had turned his back on.

This is an entertaining narrative for genealogists and history buffs.