Will I love The Barn?

Wright Thompson brings the emotion and the history too. Powerful, engrossing, and enlightening even though I grew up in the place he wrote about.

In The Barn (a narrative history/memoir, not a novel), Mississippi journalist Wright Thompson (who is renown as a sports journalist) dredges up the 1955 lynching of 14-year-old Emmitt Till in a barn nearby where Thompson, who is white, was born and raised, but which he had been taught, by the social forces surrounding him, NOT to see.

Thompson—echoing Faulkner’s “The past is never dead; it isn’t even past”—states as his intention to “interrogate the present to see what of the past remains,” because, as he puts it, “our present-day potential for violence is alive and undiminished.”

It’s an important book,… show more.