A Boy from Georgia: Coming of Age in the Segregated South by Jordan, Kathleen

When Hamilton Jordan died of peritoneal mesothelioma in 2008, he left behind amostly finished memoir, a book on which he had been working for the last decade. Jordan's daughter, Kathleen--with the help of her brothers and mother--took up the task of editing and completing the book. A Boy from Georgia--the result of this posthumous father-daughter collaboration--chronicles Hamilton Jordan's childhood in Albany, Georgia, charting his moral and intellectual development as he gradually discovers the complicated legacies of racism, religious intolerance, and southern politics, and affords his readers an intimate view of the state's wheelers and dealers. Jordan's middle-class childhood was bucolic in some ways and traumatizing in others. As Georgia politicians battled civil rights leaders, a young Hamilton straddled the uncomfortable line between the southern establishment to which he belonged and the movement in which he believed. Fortunate enough to grow up in a family that had considerabl