Carry Me Home; How Race Is Lived in America

The trick of writing about race is to breathe fresh life into a topic often animated by the stale winds of secondhand wisdom. With Carry Me Home, journalist Diane McWhorter succeeds by presenting a civil rights history that's both exhaustively researched and deeply felt. In the compilation How Race Is Lived in America, on the other hand, The New York Times serves up news that doesn't quite seem new — but with an approach so novel as to be an inspiration itself.

McWhorter's volume is subtitled Birmingham, Alabama: The Climactic Battle of the Civil Rights Revolution, which sets the book's own climax at 1963. That May, the infamy of the violent repulsion of a children's protest forced Birmingham's white leadership to take desegregation seriously. That September, a bomb planted by the Ku Klux Klan exploded at the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church. The blast killed four black schoolgirls; their murder essentially made them martyrs for the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

This is familiar history — at least it should be — but the force of Carry Me Home comes from the scope of the author's reporting. McWhorter richly documents both the internal struggles of the integrationists (chronicling differences of strategy, conflicts grounded in class, squabbles founded in ego trips) and the complex tangle of the segregationist resistance (demonstrating the complicity of the cops and the Klan, showing how the genteel city fathers contentedly let rednecks do the demagoguing and dynamiting that supported the status quo). She sketches the players in bold strokes and summons her themes with light ones, shaping the story of Birmingham into a lucid, elucidating drama about democracy.

Running through this 600-odd-page volume is McWhorter's own history as a granddaughter of Birmingham's white elite — and daughter of its vigilante fringe. Her girlhood view from the country club simply adds a bit of texture; her adult quest to learn the extent of her father's links to Klan members is the book's very motor. Though she never gets to the bottom of the matter, she gets to its heart: ''I did not understand my father, but because of that I learned to see the world in a new way. For in order to define him, I had to invoke the history of a race, of two races, and of a place.''

No less ambitious is How Race Is Lived in America, the hardcover incarnation of a series of Times articles that just won the Pulitzer Prize for national reporting. Each of the 15 pieces in the compilation tries to illuminate the full racial complexity of two or three lives in the course of roughly 7,000 words. In ''Growing Up, Growing Apart,'' we find three 10th-grade girls (one black, one white, one half-Jewish and half-Puerto Rican) whose friendship is a casualty of the self-segregating social life of their suburban New Jersey high school. ''When to Campaign With Color'' looks at Washington State's Asian-American governor, Seattle's black former mayor, and King County's black executive by way of exploring the emotional and rhetorical trickiness of neutralizing racial identity in a political campaign. And so on, from the slaughterhouse floor to the Internet frontier.

The book amounts to a dramatized tally of anxious maneuverings and tentative connections. Though we get vivid renderings of individual lives and of the racial negotiations that shape them, the big picture that reporters seem to be striving for rarely comes into focus. The nuances of race relations — all the endlessly baroque complexities of everyday life — tend to elude narrative journalism, with its need for clear shapes and satisfying summaries. Perhaps that's why the strongest pieces in the collection are the ones that most closely embrace paradox and ambiguity. ''Guarding the Borders of the Hip-Hop Nation,'' for instance, sticks in the mind because it directly reckons with a ''bundle of contradictions'' named Billy Wimsatt, a white 27-year-old whose honest passion for black culture coexists with a sense of white supremacy. ''Getting Under My Skin,'' Don Terry's memoir of growing up biracial, gets under ours by exploring the idea that ''to be both black and white...is to do nothing less than confound national consciousness.'' The fitful brilliance of How Race Is Lived in America suggests that the definitive work on the color line won't rush to any definitions at all.
Carry Me Home: A-
How Race Is Lived in America: B