To a potential reader who hesitates at the length (600 pages) - don't worry about it. It's not dense, and it's almost all personal or community stories. A pleasure to read.

The writer, who is deservedly well-known as a journalist and essayist, is not a historian by training. That is a good thing for the readability and structure of the book. She interviewed about 1,200 people for the project but narrates in rich, dirty detail the lives of only three. Between the chapters of their individual stories are contextual chapters about the South, North, and West in different eras.

The analysis of an academic historian would have made the scope of this book impossible.