This was more of a memoir than the history/true crime book I was expecting and it connected well with me because the author gave such a strong sense of time and place. It spoke to my experience, but was a couple of generations and a region of the state removed, which made it simultaneously familiar and strange.

At first I was skeptical about reading a book on Black history written by a white author, but he was self-aware and reflective, and I think it's important that white people talk about race (as long as that's not all you read.)

I thought it could have been a little tighter. There were a lot of digressions. Not all of them contributed to the whole, and even some that did could have been organized or placed better.

I did appreciate the wider view on the civil rights movement, I wasn't aware of how sharp the differences were between the 60s and the 70s.