This is a story about a newcomer to the region and, like all newcomers, Younge mixes the fresh perceptions of an innocent eye with observations that may seem new to him-or, at least, to the readers to whom this book was initially addressed-but are only too familiar to those already in or close to the scene. There is a great deal of introductory material concerning the civil rights movement, Confederate monuments, lynchings and other atrocities, and the burgeoning of a new South that an American audience is likely to find redundant. It was written for a British audience in the first instance, and that shows. No Place Like Home was originally published in Great Britain in 1999. Younge's interest was, however, racially inflected, in that it was the racial problems of the region that also intrigued him: which is why he chose to take the journey he did. To an extent, he was not alone among his and earlier generations of Britons, black and white, as far as this particular interest is concerned the British popular music revolution of the 1960s and 1970s was, after all, fueled by the black music of the South. He was, he tells us, especially and passionately interested in the black culture of the American South. Born and bred in Great Britain, he was drawn as a boy to all manifestations of black culture and the black diaspora and he was attracted, in particular, to the transnational connections linking him and his family to other peoples of African origin around the globe. Younge is black, the child of immigrants from Barbados. But he was an outsider with a special perspective. In 1997, the British journalist Gary Younge took a trip through the American South that roughly followed the route taken by the Freedom Riders in the 1960s.
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