In Love With Defeat: The Making of a Southern Liberal

Ayers was a young reporter and editor in Raleigh, Washington, and Alabama in the crucible of the civil-rights struggle, covering an enlightened state government in North Carolina, writing about the origins of civil-rights legislation as a Washington correspondent in the Kennedy years, and serving as editor of his family s hometown newspaper, the Anniston Star. The journey was one of controversy and danger a racist nightrider murder, taut moments when the community teetered on the edge of mob violence. The narrative includes outsized figures such as United States attorney general Robert Kennedy and features probing insights into Alabama governor George Wallace as he evolved over time. High points of the story involve the birth of the New South movement, the election of a Southern president, the strange undoing of his presidency, the end of the New South, and diplomatic and journalistic ventures into other nations with histories as hard as, or harder than, that of the South: Russia, China, and South Africa. An afterword, made imperative by the election of a black president, bridges the years from the disappearance of the New South in the 1980s to Barack Obama s first term.