Praise for Carry Me Home

“[McWhorter] contributes significantly to the historical record.”

The New York Times Book Review (cover review)

“A tour de force, comparable in importance to J. Anthony Lukas’s Common Ground and Taylor Branch’s Parting the Waters. Carry Me Home is destined to become a classic in the history of the civil rights revolution.”

—David Herbert Donald, author of Lincoln

“A big, important book, a challenging portrait of an American city at the center of the most significant domestic drama of the twentieth century.”

—Jon Meacham, Newsweek

“This epic of reportage and history about Birmingham, Alabama, in the early ’60s reads like a big ambitious novel. . . . McWhorter’s complex narrative roves skillfully forward and backward . . . the cast is huge and vivid, the story brimming with courage, drama, villains, and heroes. The War and Peace of the civil rights movement.”

—Harry Bauld, People

“Her narrative takes on the suspense of a detective novel. . . . Carry Me Home is an ambitious, panoramic history with enough personal memoir to make us see why Diane McWhorter cannot forget—and wants us to remember—the momentous events that took place during one historic year in one Alabama city.”

—Francine Prose, O Magazine

“McWhorter’s own involvement in the story . . . reenergizes the struggle, serving as a reminder that history is always personal.”

—The New Yorker

“Fresh, sometimes startling details distinguish this doorstop page-turner told by a daughter of [Birmingham’s] white elite. [McWhorter] brings a gripping pace and an unusual, twofold perspective to her account, incorporating her viewpoint as a child . . . as well as her adult viewpoint as an avid scholar and journalist.”

Publishers Weekly (starred)

“No current book . . . delves more deeply into the nuances of the movement era than Diane McWhorter’s Carry Me Home.

—Jack E. White, Time

“Diane McWhorter’s powerful moral epic about the civil rights movement in Birmingham, Alabama, contains all the elements of first-rate history, including dauntingly thorough research, a sure grasp of the big picture as well as the tiny details that illuminate it, evocative writing that brings action and character springing off the page, and a novelist’s sense of how to mold a compelling narrative arc out of the innumerable molecules of historical fact.”

—Harper Barnes, St. Louis Post-Dispatch

“The product of nineteen years of research, Carry Me Home is a brilliant work of history.”

—Craig Flournoy, The Dallas Morning News

“A stunningly provocative and vividly written history.”

—Bruce Clayton, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

“An heir of the insightful, mid-century southern writer, Lillian Smith.”

—Nell Irvin Painter, Journal of Blacks in Higher Education

“McWhorter is relentless . . . [a] rebellious insider and sleuth. . . . Her most important contribution is to follow the money and let it push the boundaries of her story back in time.”

—Jacquelyn Dowd Hall, Chronicle of Higher Education

“A vivid, admirably nuanced, and wide-ranging history of the city that became ground zero in the civil rights struggle . . . dense, detailed, and insightful.”

Kirkus Reviews (starred)

Carry Me Home is a staggering book . . . a twentieth century Iliad.

—Kate Callen, San Diego Union-Tribune

Carry Me Home reads like a detective story as McWhorter relentlessly pursues her prey. . . . A powerful memoir and an absorbing social history, Carry Me Home belongs with Taylor Branch’s Parting the Waters and Howell Raines’s My Soul Is Rested.

—James A. Miller, The Boston Globe

“The force of Carry Me Home comes from the scope of the author’s reporting. . . . She sketches the players in bold strokes and summons her themes with light ones, shaping the story of Birmingham into a lucid, elucidating drama about democracy.”

—Troy Patterson, Entertainment Weekly

“Powerfully written, vividly recounted, McWhorter’s intimate yet magisterial narrative adds important insights to our understanding of the Ku Klux Klan and its connections with official power in the South.”

—Ruth Rosen, Los Angeles Times

“Impeccable history . . . in the polished prose of a novelist . . . A terrifically brave book.”

—Lauren F. Winner, Newsday

“Impressive . . . gutsy.”

Elle