Dixie: A Personal Odyssey Through Events That Shaped the Modern South (Hardcover)

by Curtis Wilkie (Author)

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly
In this social chronicle of the American South's past 40 years, Wilkie (coauthor, Arkansas Mischief), a native Mississippian who exiled himself, proves that, indeed, you can't take the South out of the boy. Drawing on his own memories and dozens of books and magazine articles, Wilkie retells the big stories he covered as a journalist, most notably for the Boston Globe: Ole Miss's forced acceptance of its first black student in 1962; "Freedom Summer" of 1964, "the most terrible year of violence since the Civil War"; Nixon's Southern Strategy to wrestle the Southern vote from the Democrats; the election of Jimmy Carter; the conviction of Medgar Evers's murderer in 1994, 31 years after the crime. But at the core of this book is Wilkie's own development in the face of enormous changes. Raised as someone "who observed segregationist customs, but disapproved of blatant bigotry," Wilkie becomes appalled by the South's racism. In 1969, he flees Mississippi for the cultivated Northeast he'd read about in Cheever and Updike novels, planning never to return. Of course, he discovers New England has its own problems, like the controversial student busing program in 1975 Boston. After 25 years, Wilkie moves southward again and finds it, like himself, changed yet unchanged. "My generation experienced more disruption in our social order than any other.... Yet we maintained our own culture, our accent, our cuisine, our music as if should we give them up we would finally admit defeat." Wilkie's candid analyses and self-examination lift this book above a mere rehashing of the times.

Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

From Booklist
Wilkie, a noted journalist, grew up in Mississippi and launched his career there. His book is a series of essays "based primarily on memory . . . freshened and reinforced" by recent and extensive background reading. In recalling the Mississippi of his childhood, youth, and young manhood, he in essence takes his readers on a political and sociological tour of the South during the region's cataclysmic sea change, for he grew up during the years when black resistance to Jim Crow laws was gathering momentum. He attended Old Miss during that institution's worst days of attempting to preserve its segregationist policies, and as a cub reporter for a Mississippi newspaper, he witnessed civil rights violence firsthand. Getting his fill of his home state's foot-dragging, he left the South for more than two decades, working for the Boston Globe. But he always felt like a misfit in the North, and his southern consciousness eventually drew him back to Dixie. His book is a very effective observance of the lay of a land swept by irreversible forces. Brad Hooper
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 352 pages
• Publisher: Scribner (September 25, 2001)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0684872854
• ISBN-13: 978-0684872858
• Product Dimensions: 9.5 x 6.6 x 1.1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.3 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.5 out of 5 stars See all reviews (6 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #470,578 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

4 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Best of the "American South" Studies, July 22, 2003

By	Deborah Morse-Kahn (Minneapolis, MN USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Dixie: A Personal Odyssey Through Events That Shaped the Modern South (Paperback)

For anyone searching for indepth studies of the postwar American South, this is absolutely it. Wilkie brings the keen eye of a child of the South to the descriptions of life in his home town, county, state and region, and uses his journalist's skills to make it all vibrant and immediate to readers of any geographic locale. He does not pull punches in his frank descriptions of what was true in the South's postwar decades, nor does he excuse his own participations and prejudices as he passes through his own changes on a long journey to understanding the nation's necessary reassessments of civil rights and collective wrongs. While it helps to have a prior knowledge of the Civil Rights movement in this country, and a sense of how the Dixiecrats became Republicans, this book is accessible to any reader of American history and social change.

5 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars What a Southerner Won't Tell You, October 26, 2001

By A Customer

Having been born in Mississippi and having defected to the West at the age of 23, I picked up Wilke's book to get in touch with my "Southern roots". Wilke's account of his roots and his involvement with the civil rights movement is more than any of my high school and college history books could ever explain.

Progressive Curtis Wilke made me realize I should be proud of my heritage but also aghast at what caused all of these atrocities and racist views. The South's dirty laundry is something that needs to be acknowledged in order to overcome the past.

7 of 10 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Dixie--Better than the Chicks, October 1, 2001

By A Customer

Curtis Wilkie's Dixie is described as a "personal odyssey"--that it is. It is a terrific account of growing up in the Old South and being a part of the making of the New South. It is howlingly funny in parts and chillingly thoughtful and full of insight. Any person northerner or southerner will find this book rewazrding.