Why read Necessary Trouble?

Book cover of Necessary Trouble: Growing Up at Midcentury

Book description

AN INSTANT NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER

A memoir of coming of age in a conservative Southern family in postwar America.

To grow up in the 1950s was to enter a world of polarized national alliances, nuclear threat, and destabilized social hierarchies. Two world wars and the depression that connected them…

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Race relations

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Why read it?

1 author picked Necessary Trouble as one of their favorite books. Why do they recommend it?

Geoffrey Parker

Author

Born in 1947, the author is four years younger than me. Although she grew up as a girl in the US, not as a boy in the UK like me, I was spellbound by the chapters about her participation as a young student trying to desegregate the South, starting in the “Freedom Summer” of 1964.

I bought the book on the strength of a single sentence quoted in a review. She described how, as an undergraduate at Bryn Mawr, she watched on TV as the police brutally dispersed the first march in Selma: “From that moment, I knew I had…

From Geoffrey's 3 favorite reads in 2023.