Rating: 
Summary: A Lost Voice Of A Lost Cause
Review: This is one of those books that is almost impossible to objectively review. The writing is elegant and evocative of an era in the South that died almost in tandem with Mr. Percy and yet I find some parts of it so arrogant and condescending that I feel myself grinding my teeth. You see, I am descended from those Mississippi hill people Percy so despised and, even after all this time, I can almost see the languid gaze and soft, drawling voice. My people came to the Yazoo-Mississippi Delta after the Flood of '27 and we build and earned what we got without the benefit of the massive slave labor that built Mr. Percy's fortune.But this is a book review and I'll put aside old feelings to say that this is a literary gem that brings to life a way of life on which so many stereotypes of the South are built. And Will Percy is amazingly honest in his descriptions of his society. However, a society this simple and yet this complex takes more than just one book to grasp. Thus, I also recommend "Rising Tide" by John Barry and "The Most Southern Place on Earth: The Mississippi Delta and the Roots of Regional Identity" by James Cobb to balance your view of this time and place in history. Bottom line: This is a wonderful, beautifully written story that is refreshingly candid with none of the defensiveness and politically correct breast beating of many of the works of southern writers of recent years.
Rating: 
Summary: The Old South,not how it was, but should have been.
Review: To read this book is to truly appreciate the best the Southern aristocracy had to offer us. Mr. Percy writes of a world very different from ours, and in many ways better. As his own world slipped away from him, he wrote, as no one has, of what was in it worth preserving.
| 
