"Brings together the best of Robert Coles' articles on the South written since 1958. It recreates those strengths and weaknesses in the Old South made so prominent in during a decade of violent social change. As a journalist, Coles speaks about politics - in Georgia, South Carolina, Mississippi and Texas; as a physician about poverty and malnutrition; as a literary critic about the social fabric reflected in the writings of James Baldwin, Walker Percy, Cormac McCarthy and Shirley Anne Grau; and as a psychologist about children, black and white, who first desegregated Southern schools, and about their parents, teachers, opponents and supporters. Finally, in a wholly new evaluation Robert Coles returns to the South, observing the changes in the Southern conscience and consciousness, the marked difference in the attitudes and actions of people he first started visiting in the 1950's." -- cover, p.[4].