Kill the Messenger: One Man's Fight Against Bigotry and Greed

Rating:
Summary: Kill The Messenger
Review: McCormick is nothing like the book says it is. My dad grew up in that small town and everybody knows everybody. It's a small friendly town. Fortenberry is a journalist that doesn't have anything better to do than ruin pople's lives. He even wanted to make a movie out of the book. I just wanted to say that this book portrays the small town of McCormick as a town that is still in the civil war and that is divided. The book is nothing like real life!

Rating:
Summary: More Carolina Skeletons!
Review: When McCormick, as with the state in which the town is located, South Carolina, hits the headlines its not usually for the best of reasons. In the early 1980s, after over fifty years of economic decline and a significant loss of population, McCormick was featured in US News as one of a number small towns likely to disappear. This prediction proved overly pessimistic and McCormick has survived to become a significant stop on the Palmetto state's Heritage Corridor. Ken Fortenberry's book highlights an interim period in the town's fortunes during the mid-1980s. As editor and owner of the town newspaper, the McCormick Messenger, Fortenberry found himself literally under fire when he started to print the details of some of the shadier goings-on in the local Sheriff's department. Kill the Messenger follows the Fortenberry family's fortunes throughout their brief period of residence in McCormick, in the process revealing a deep-rooted corruption in the social and political fabric of the town. The book is a quick read, written in a journalistic style aptly suited to the subject matter. In its description of the town and some the local charcaters, Fortenberry pulls no punches and the book's impact is still felt in the town. Unlike Savannah's Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil, you won't find this particular book featuring as the centrepiece of a literary tour and you won't find too many people willing to sit down and discuss 'the book' with either. However, Fortenberry's book does have a certain morbid fascination with the local population, as the McCormick County library can't keep a copy on the shelves - over a dozen have been stolen to date! Indeed, perhaps this acts as the strongest recommendation for Kill the Messenger.

Rating:
Summary: Legacy of Apathy
Review: While I agree with a number of the comments made by the first reviewer here, I would like to add a number of further observations that I think lend extra value to Fortenberry's text. In his portrait of McCormick, Fortenberry pays particular attention to the subject of education. McCormick is rigidly divided along lines of race and this is reflected in the schools. The more affluent whites are warehoused in the lamentable Long Cane Academy, which survives on the display of teenage flesh in hopelessly outmoded 'beauty pageants' and door-to-door ticket sales for BBQ and alike. The county's majority black population attend the crumbling public school system, the appearance of which more befits a gulag than an educational facility. The County had opportunity to change this situation through a school bond referendum earlier this year, however, the aging white residents of Savannah Lakes Village - a 'Gone With the Wind' and golf themed retirement complex/special tax haven newly built on the County's lakeside border - voted against the bond and set back educational progress another 15 years. Fortenberry's book highlights the root of this apathy and spiritual corruption. His portrait of a community hopelessly divided along the colour line is spot on and little has changed in 15 years. Perhaps it is time to re-read Kill the Messenger and take some decisive action.