Library Journal
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Journalist McWhorter (the New York Times) offers a three-part chronicle of Birmingham, AL, the crucial battleground of the Civil Rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s. A daughter of privilege, she puts her homefolk's resistance to black civil rights in a national context. But her signal contribution is her account of life inside Fortress Segregation. She reveals the intimate workings and absolutism of segregation, which she dubs "a civilization more peculiar than slavery." Her detailed portrait of white intransigence and retaliation climaxes in 1963 with Police Commissioner Eugene "Bull" Connor's dogs and the September 15 dynamiting that killed four black girls at the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church. McWhorter's literate, often barbed, well-referenced local history with a family twist is a feat of reporting that belongs alongside David Halberstam's The Children (LJ 2/15/98), Taylor Branch's Parting the Waters: America in the King Years, 1954-1963 (LJ 1/89. o.p.), and such works on Birmingham as John Walton Cotman's Birmingham, JFK, and the Civil Rights Act of 1963 (1989). Recommended for all collections on civil rights and U.S. or Southern history. [Previewed in Prepub Alert, LJ 11/15/00.] Thomas J. Davis, Arizona State Univ., Tempe (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

Publishers Weekly
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The story of civil rights in Birmingham, Ala., has been told before from the unspeakable violence to the simple, courageous decencies but fresh, sometimes startling details distinguish this doorstop page-turner told by a daughter of the city's white elite. McWhorter, a regular New York Times contributor, focuses on two shattering moments in Birmingham in 1963 that led to "the end of apartheid in America": when "Bull Connor's police dogs and fire hoses" attacked "school age witnesses for justice," and when the Ku Klux Klan bombed the 16th Street Church, killing four black girls. Yet she brings a gripping pace and an unusual, two-fold perspective to her account, incorporating her viewpoint as a child (she was largely ignorant of what was going on "downtown," even as her father took an increasingly active role in opposing the civil rights movement), as well as her adult viewpoint as an avid scholar and journalist. Surveying figures both major and minor civil rights leaders, politicians, clergy, political organizers of all stripes her panoramic study unmasks prominent members of Birmingham in collusion with the Klan, revealing behind-the-scenes machinations of "terrorists on the payroll at U.S. Steel" and men like Sid Smyer, McWhorter's distant cousin, who "bankrolled... one of the city's most rabid klansmen." McWhorter binds it all together with the strong thread of a family saga, fueled by a passion to understand the father about whom she had long harbored "vague but sinister visions" and other men of his class and clan. (Mar. 15) Forecast: McWhorter's prominence and her willingness to name names as well as her exhaustive research and skillful narrative virtually guarantee major review attention. Bolstered by an eight-city tour and a pre-pub excerpt in Talk in February, the 50,000-copy first printing should move fast. (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved

Kirkus
Copyright © Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

From a journalist and member of one of Birmingham?s leading families, a vivid, admirably nuanced, and wide-ranging history of the city that became ground zero in the Civil Rights struggle as black children marched, the white establishment wrestled with the need to change, and the Ku Klux Klan engaged in murderous bombings. Founded only in 1871, Birmingham rapidly became a dynamic industrial center, but this city of ?perpetual promise? saw its share of hard times. These in turn led to strong unions, a resentful white underclass, alienated blacks, and a white elite imbued with a company-town ethos. By the late 1950s, as the demand for American steel declined, growing unemployment led to a rebirth of the Klan. Already suspicious of outsiders?in the 1930s communists were active in the unions and the emerging civil-rights organizations?the white city fathers (with Bull Connor in charge) were determined to resist the demands for integration. Like George Wallace, they believed that segregation was forever. McWhorter describes all the significant events and the relevant players: men like Fred Shuttleworth, the Baptist minister who initiated peaceful black mass action in the city only to be supplanted by Martin Luther King (who wrote his seminal ?Letter from a Birmingham Jail? while imprisoned there in 1963); George Wallace, who disavowed his liberal beliefs for the sake of political power; the Kennedys, trying desperately to contain the conflagrations; as well as bit players like Sam Smyer, a racist city leader who understood that photos of police dogs attacking children harmed the city and began to work for change; and Elizabeth Hood Cobb, who gave the police information about her uncle?s involvement in the bombing of the church in which four black girls were killed. The author ends her account with new information about the bombings. A dense, detailed, and insightful history. First serial to Talk Magazine; first printing of 50,000; author tour

Library Journal
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

McWhorter, who was born into Birmingham's white elite, examines the city's pivotal role in the battle for civil rights. (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

Book list
From Booklist, Copyright © American Library Association. Used with permission.

In this groundbreaking book, McWhorter, a journalist and regular contributor to the New York Times and USA Today, tells the story of her hometown, Birmingham, Alabama, and the dramatic events that unfolded there during the civil rights struggle of the 1950s and 1960s. A daughter of Birmingham's privileged elite, McWhorter weaves a personal narrative through this startling account of the history, events, and major players on both sides of the civil rights battle in that city. In painstaking detail, she reveals the hardships and horrors (including police dogs, water cannons, and bombings) faced by the Black Freedom Fighters, but she also plainly shows the conspiracy between the town's establishment, the city's public officials, and the vicious Klansmen who did the "dirty" work, in their furious resistance to desegregation. Exhaustively researched yet still compellingly readable, McWhorter's book is an excellent choice for libraries. --Kathleen Hughes