Scrupulously researched and teeming with facts and citations.

Provocative.

... engrossing if erratic.

In this highly personal travelogue, she brings readers along to absorb her observations and internal dialogue.

Imani Perry’s rangy, observant book, South to America, is in large part an attempt to undo that reflex, to expose multiple Souths. Indeed, she argues, conventional wisdom has it exactly backward: the resistance to the diversity of the South reveals a racist instinct to apply uniformity that has infected the rest of the country.

The South has been stereotyped and corralled, its vibrant complexity and profound influence due for renewed and rigorous attention. Perry...accomplishes exactly that in this saturated, gorgeously written, and keenly revelatory travelogue.

Perry...interweaves personal and regional history in this impressionistic study of the American South. Adding depth and nuance to standard portrayals of 'lost cause' narratives of white supremacy...Perry’s meditations range far and wide, alluding to literary theorists, basketball stars, Supreme Court rulings, and her own ancestors with equal familiarity and insight, though the breadth often comes at the expense of depth, particularly when she is relating historical events, such as abolitionist John Brown’s 1859 raid on the federal armory at Harper’s Ferry. Still, this is a rich and imaginative tour of a crucial piece of America..

... an intimate, penetrating journey through the South.