"If Dixie Can Make Peace with the Hellish Parts of Its Legacy while Fostering Its Inherent Strengths, It Just Might Achieve a Real Breakthrough"

"Thompson finds the greatest reason for hope in an unlikely place—the past, specifically that part of it staked out by the Agrarians, the group of Vanderbilt University teachers and students (among them Robert Penn Warren) who in 1930 published 'I'll Take My Stand,' a manifesto in praise of the Southern way of life.
"Although wrong about race, the book was right about much else. The Agrarians championed sustainable family farms, ecology, human scale and, most of all, community. They were green many decades before the rest of America, and they were down home."

Steve Oney in the Los Angeles Times reviews Tracy Thompson's The New Mind of the South.