"Naipaul’s chapters honor the diversity that marks the South…. Conservatives and liberals, whites and blacks, men and women speak for themselves, and reveal the dark side of the story in their own ways…fascinating and revealing." — Eugene D. Genovese, New Republic
"His writing is clean and beautiful, and he has a great eye for nuance…. No American writer could achieve [his] kind of evenhandedness, and it gives Naipaul’s perceptions an almost built-in originality." — Atlantic Monthly
