Birmingham tragedies

Carry Me Home: Birmingham, Alabama--The Climatic Battle of the Civil Rights Revolution. By Diane McWhorter. Simon & Schuster, 706 pp., $35.00.

Histories of the civil rights movement often become psychodramas, tracing the tribulations of the movement's iconic black leadership in the face of an undifferentiated mass of white oppression. In her powerful new book, Diane McWhorter largely bypasses such heroics and gives us instead the racial biography of a place.

In 1963, Birmingham, Alabama, seared itself painfully on the national psyche through a series of violent images. A German shepherd snapping at the belly of a teenager. The Birmingham Fire Department blasting a huddled mass of children with a column of water. The haunting smiles of the four girls killed in the bombing of the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church. McWhorter, a native of Birmingham who writes regularly on issues of race for the New York Times, connects these images to the details of everyday life. She humanizes Birmingham, showing it inhabited by people like ourselves, and creating a history with which we can identify.