Book : The Deepest South Of All True Stories From Natchez,..

-Titulo Original : The Deepest South Of All True Stories From Natchez, Mississippi

-Fabricante :

Simon & Schuster

-Descripcion Original:

Bestselling travel writer Richard Grant offers an entertaining and profound look at a city like no other. Natchez, Mississippi, once had more millionaires per capita than anywhere else in America, and its wealth was built on slavery and cotton. Today it has the greatest concentration of antebellum mansions in the South, and a culture full of unexpected contradictions. Prominent white families dress up in hoopskirts and Confederate uniforms for ritual celebrations of the Old South, yet Natchez is also progressive enough to elect a gay black man for mayor with 91% of the vote. Much as John Berendt did for Savannah in Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil and the hit podcast S-Town did for Woodstock, Alabama, so Richard Grant does for Natchez in The Deepest South of All. With humor and insight, he depicts a strange, eccentric town with an unforgettable cast of characters. There’s Buzz Harper, a six-foot-five gay antique dealer famous for swanning around in a mink coat with a uniformed manservant and a very short German bodybuilder. There’s Ginger Hyland, “The Lioness,” who owns 500 antique eyewash cups and decorates 168 Christmas trees with her jewelry collection. And there’s Nellie Jackson, a Cadillac-driving brothel madam who became an FBI informant about the KKK before being burned alive by one of her customers. Interwoven through these stories is the more somber and largely forgotten account of Abd al Rahman Ibrahima, a West African prince who was enslaved in Natchez and became a cause celebre in the 1820s, eventually gaining his freedom and returning to Africa. Part history and part travelogue, The Deepest South of All offers a gripping portrait of a complex American place, as it struggles to break free from the past and confront the legacy of slavery. Review [An] entertaining and informative travelogue...Readers will be enthralled by Grant’s lively prose and the colorful contradictions of this unique and haunted place.-Publishers Weekly (starred review) This richly layered book offers a multifaceted view of the culture and history of an American city that, in its history, reveals the roots of the racial conflicts that continue to haunt the American psyche. An entertaining and thought-provoking memoir and sociological portrait.-Kirkus Reviews Grant deftly and pointedly juxtaposes anecdotes of garden club turf wars among the city’s wealthy, white elite with appalling accounts of slave auctions, life under Jim Crow rule, and the continuing inequality still facing the city’s Black residents. At a time when our country once again attempts to confront its systemic racism, Grant’s potent examination of the confluence of white and African American cultures presents a timely overview of the source of many deep-seated misperceptions and struggles. -Booklist (starred review) “Grant plops himself in the town of Natchez, Mississippi, during its annual Tableaux. He chronicles the antebellum-themed pageant’s organizers’ struggles to keep it relevant-and their deeper conflicts about what it represents-with empathy, skepticism, and exquisitely dry wit. One local’s quip to Grant sums it up perfectly: ‘This whole town is like a Southern Twin Peaks.’”-Jonathan Miles, Garden & Gun “Use a random number generator and you’ll always land on a page that will leave you chuckling, lifting your jaw off the floor or shaking your head in dismay…Though filled with wild and woolly tales, Grant’s travelogue also posits Natchez as a stand-in for the nation and a guidepost pointing the way forward.” -Stuart Miller, The Los Angeles Times “Travel writer Grant sensitively probes the complex and troubled history of the oldest city on the Mississippi River through the eyes of a cast of eccentric and unexpected characters.”-Juliana Rose Pignataro, Newsweek (“25 Must-Read Fall Books to Escape the Chaos of 2020”) With the easygoing manner-social and literary-displayed in Dispatches from Pluto, Richard Grant has slipped in