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Rating: 
Summary: I Take it Back
Review: Earlier I gave a lukewarm review of this book. In hindsight, the book just was not what I expected. I expected a more narrative history and was disappointed when I did not get it. But that was not the author's intent. What is done here, is done exceptionally well. Truly fascinating. I'm so glad I picked it back up so I can correct the record.
Rating:
Summary: I Take it Back
Review: Earlier I gave a lukewarm review of this book. In hindsight, the book just was not what I expected. I expected a more narrative history and was disappointed when I did not get it. But that was not the author's intent. What is done here, is done exceptionally well. Truly fascinating. I'm so glad I picked it back up so I can correct the record.
Rating: 
Summary: Money, Mississippi
Review: I was not impressed. What I thought would be a thorough treatment of Till's lynching was instead a collection of others' work. So many different points of view makes it impossible to read as a narrative or as history. Interesting, yes, and the book has its place as a source of accounts written at the time of the murder and trial, but other books do a better job of presenting a complete account. If you get this book as a companion piece to other works, do yourself a favor and skip the author's commentary.
Rating:
Summary: The Lynching of Emmett Till: A Documentary Narrative
Review: It has been claimed that the lynching of 14-year-old Emmett Till in 1955 was the spark that set off the American civil rights movement. In this volume, Metress (English, Samford U.) weaves together excerpts from newspapers and editorials of the day, which provide sometimes-contradictory accounts of the murder and trial. The anthology also contains selections from poems, songs, interviews, essays, and memoirs relating to the incident.
Rating:
Summary: Money, Mississippi
Review: Some might say the 1950s should provide the history, while we in the 21st century provide the analysis -- particularly in matters of race, where the discourse of fifty years ago might be thought too embryonic to add anything to today's sophisticated discussions. Think again. More than half the pages of Chris Metress's 'The Lynching of Emmett Till' are devoted to writings contemporary with the famous case. These pieces display not only the passion and immediacy you would expect -- and which are invaluable for the modern reader -- but also great shrewdness, subtlety, and eloquence, as they report on what one writer calls a "total, unavenged obliteration." (Not every contributor is sympathetic to Till, by the way; just one example is an announcement from the American Anti-Communist Militia claiming that Till is alive and well in California!)The rest of the book, made up of pieces written in the years since, shows how the Till tragedy has lingered in the American imagination and conscience. Metress collects remarkable meditations on the Till case by Anne Moody, John Edgar Wideman, Langston Hughes, among others. It is quite incredible how Till has loomed in these writers' thoughts. (The book even includes a really awful - and, fortunately, disowned -- song by Bob Dylan.) Metress's commentary fully situates the reader in all the various contexts but is never overbearing. This is a book of voices; Metress is a superb listener.
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