16 of 17 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
If you want to understand the South, read this., April 9, 2005
This review is from: Praying for Sheetrock: A Work of Nonfiction (Paperback)
As a native Southerner, I can say that Melissa Faye Greene is spot-on in creating her characters. Her descriptions of people, places, scenes, sounds, and smells bring everything to life. I find myself saying again and again, "I've experienced that; I know that person." I gave this book to my teen-ager so she would understand why racial politics are what they are in the South; she's now re-reading it -- on her own -- for the third time. Parts of this story will make you laugh out loud; others will make you angry; throughout, there is the human struggle for dignity. If you want to understand the South of the current generation and the one before it, I recommend this book highly.
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15 of 16 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
The More Things Stay The Same, March 15, 2001
This review is from: Praying for Sheetrock: A Work of Nonfiction (Paperback)
My mother was born and raised in McIntosh County Georgia. She confirms the truck crash incident along with the Sheriff's drug cartel and other corruptions. She admitted that many blacks in the County looked up to Sheriff Tom Poppel and considered him a good man. I was born in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Upon recommendation by a doctor my mother moved home to McIntosh County. I became a citizen of McIntosh County in 1983 and experienced an extreme culture-shock. The housing was inadequate, education was minimum, employment was scarce, race relations were very much segregated and people still spake Gullah. As a matter of fact in 1983 there was a separate prom for white and black students. It is fatally ironic that Thurnell Alston was caught in a drug sting. The truth of the matter is he became a victim of his own circumstance. I visited him in the hospital before he succumbed to cancer. His sons and I were close friends and I never really understood the significance of who he was until I read the book (Praying for Sheetrock) and consider it to be a well-written book for all to read especially citizens of McIntosh County. However because the lack of education exists many in McIntosh County will not read the book. Unfortunately the more things change the more they remain the same.
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9 of 10 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
An evocative oral history and a provocative work of journalism, February 21, 2006
This review is from: Praying for Sheetrock: A Work of Nonfiction (Paperback)
There are a number of astonishing things about this provocative and evocative history of a remote coastal region of Georgia. Greene's chronicle is not simply an account of the institutional and covert racism that plagued one Southern county. Nor is it merely a biography of an unlikely black leader who led a momentous, peaceful rebellion against the white hierarchy before succumbing (at best) to his own credulity or (at worst) to the very corruption he criticized. Instead, "Praying for Sheetrock" is a composite oral history of a complex, deceptively quiet community during the 1970s and 1980s, where the social norms seemed old-fashioned, even quaint, and where even justifiably disgruntled citizens, both white and black, are restrained equally by an ill-defined sense of fear and by a desire to get along with their neighbors.
At the time of the writing, McIntosh County had been dominated by a corrupt yet efficient, nepotistic yet clever "Old Boy" network, but it was also populated by an impoverished black community that, on the surface, seemed to have been on good terms with the local white authorities all through the chaos of the civil rights struggle. For many years, state and federal authorities suspected that county officials, led by Sheriff Tom Poppell, had been deeply implicated in jury tampering, tax evasion, bribery, illegal gambling, drug-running, prostitution, and even murder. Folks joked that Poppell "was the only sheriff in America who owned four houses, one with an airfield, and all on twelve thousand dollars a year." Yet every attempt by higher authorities (who regularly indicated on their reports that Poppell was to be considered "armed and dangerous") failed to nab the suspects. The victims of their never-indicted yet well-documented activities included tourists on the way through the county to family vacations in Florida as well as the local poor.
The story of how this county eventually entered the late 20th century makes fascinating reading, and Greene's prose is an odd yet refreshing blend of journalism and lyricism. (It was included among the top 100 works of 20th-century American journalism by the New York University School of Journalism.) The reader is repeatedly stunned by her ability to persuade such a wide spectrum of local citizens--rich and poor, white and black, conservative and liberal--to talk at such length and with such honesty. Only at the very end of the book, in the acknowledgments, does it become clear that the author was far from a Janie-come-lately to the scene: she worked at Georgia Legal Services (which provided advice on civil liberties matters for the black community), was a witness to most of the events, and married one of the lawyers featured in the book. Rather than prejudicing her account, her experiences give the events an insider's perspective and make her relative objectivity all the more admirable. In fact, it's safe to say that only Greene could have written this book. And, much like "Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil" (itself set only a few miles to the north), her book manages to look underneath the scandal and the poverty and to reveal much to admire in the gentle camaraderie of these easygoing neighbors.
Above all, "Praying for Sheetrock" reminds us of the courageous heroes who look "upon law, upon the Constitution, as a series of fundamental truths about basic human rights." Those heroes include black community members, young and old, willing to risk everything for those rights; the lawyers who represented and advised them for next to nothing; and the small yet powerful number of local whites who believed that enough was enough. It's an inspiring tale that reminds us that the civil rights struggle is far from over.
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