Just a lot of stuff I didn't know or knew only vaguely. Well written; really liked it. The end, which details how they fail to achieve their specific demands but (you could argue) laid the groundwork for change anyway, has given me a lot of food for thought about how society actually goes about changing and the role of activism. ( )

Recommended by Hassan Adeeb

Despite having already read a number of books about the degradations that the South, and Mississippi in particular, have inflicted upon the blacks after the Civil War, I was terribly moved by this book. In essence, this book is about the summer of 1964 in which great efforts were made to allow the blacks of Mississippi to have the same rights of citizenship that white people enjoyed. Rights that one would have thought they had obtained after being freed as slaves a century earlier. I could talk at length about this book's contents, but I'll limit it to just three of many reactions I had while reading it. First, the dynamics of the situation that this book covers are well related to that of the American troops that served in occupied Iraq, constantly dealing with the dangers of the insurgency. Unfortunately for the freedom volunteers in Mississippi, they had similar dangers, but without all the weapons and body armor to protect them. Second, there is a dramatic element to the author's writing that at first bothered me. This is a "history" and historians don't embellish the facts. But then it occurred to me, if one person is beaten to a pulp, shot dead, and chopped into pieces because another person regards the first person as no better than a mongrel dog, does it really step over the line if the writer goes a step further and points out that this might be a bad thing? And third, I don't recall ever reading another book in which each time I picked it up to start reading further, I found myself quickly awash in thoughts about a myriad of issues related to the story and my relationship to those issues. It was like an internal book club discussion being reconvened every new time I started reading. I had to stop myself and just read. And as compelling as my inner thoughts were, the new sections I would be reading were always even more compelling. Finally, even though the book ends with better news about the subsequent state of race relations in Mississippi, it was the day before I finished the book that CNN had a new story about black victims of hit-and-run accidents by whites and of incidents that the white authorities failed to investigate for over three years until CNN started pushing the matter. The reaction from one of the county sheriffs could have been word for word from the sheriffs that abused the freedom volunteers so badly back in 1964. ( )

Bruce Watson's account of the 1964 voter registration drive in Mississippi captures the hue of the era through extensive use of intimately personal narratives, media and historic records. Studious research, first-person accounts, the hindsight of history, and the ability to capture the language and tone of the movement, make "Freedom Summer" a simultaneous snapshot of a fading past and a living struggle — deft, rooted, reflective. ( )

Bruce Watson's account of the 1964 voter registration drive in Mississippi captures the hue of the era through extensive use of intimately personal narratives, media and historic records. Studious research, first-person accounts, the hindsight of history, and the ability to capture the language and tone of the movement, make "Freedom Summer" a simultaneous snapshot of a fading past and a living struggle — deft, rooted, reflective. ( )