Americas - Travel Essays & Descriptions, United States History - Southern Region, U.S. Travel - General & Regional, United States History - General & Miscellaneous, Civilization - History

A Turn in the South

Name: A Turn in the South
Author: V. S. Naipaul
ISBN: 9780679724889

by V. S. Naipaul

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Overview

V. S. Naipaul’s first book about the United States is a revealing, disturbing, elegiac book about the hidden life and culture of the American South — from Atlanta to Charleston, Tallahassee to Tuskegee, Nashville to Chapel Hill.

A revealing, disturbing book about the American South - a part of the country that nonetheless remains a world unto intself.

Synopsis

In the tradition of political and cultural revelation V.S. Naipaul so brilliantly made his own in Among The Believers, A Turn In The South, his first book about the United States, is a revealing, disturbing, elegiac book about the American South — from Atlanta to Charleston, Tallahassee to Tuskegee, Nashville to Chapel Hill.

Publishers Weekly

``Naipaul portrays the American South as a strange mixture of self-reliance and community, desperation and playfulness,'' wrote PW . coffey/i like your changes/ok i suppose since the quote is ours?/pk ``Part travelogue, part oral history, this ruminative ramble permits Naipaul to depict the South as only an `outsider' could, with wonderment and multiple cross-cultural references.'' (Feb.)

About the Author, V. S. Naipaul

In awarding V. S. Naipaul the Nobel prize for literature in 2001, the Swedish Academy called him a "literary circumnavigator" and a "modern philosophe." Both tags seem spot-on, given Naipaul's gift for describing -- in both his fictional and nonfictional studies of India, Africa, and beyond -- the humor and pathos of cultural collisions.

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Editorials

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

Library Journal

In this work, parts of which orginally appeared in the New Yorker, noted essayist and novelist Naipaul travels the American South in an attempt to explore and explain this unique region. Stopping at places as diverse as Atlanta and rural Mississippi, Naipaul develops contacts and sources which span race, class, and sex. He admits that at the start of his journey he had no central theme. And, indeed, at the end, no clear ``mind'' of the South emerges. Rather, the South seems infinitely varied in outlook and attitude, vaguely unified only by a common past that tends to emphasize a sense of order, reverence for ``the land,'' and intense religious faith. Because of a perhaps necessary lack of focus, this will not be easy reading for everyone. But Naipaul's insights--and those of the Southerners he talks to--are penetrating enough to make this a valuable addition to most libraries.-- Anthony O. Edmonds, Ball State Univ., Muncie, Ind.