What do Americans need to know about the South in order to understand America?

Amani Perry will be here to talk about her latest book, South to America.

How did we come to play the games we all love and sometimes hate?

Oliver Raider will join us to talk about his debut book, Seven Games, A Human History.

Alexander Alter will be here to talk about what's going on in the publishing world.

Plus, our critics will join us to talk about the books they've been reading and reviewing.

This is the Book Review Podcast from the New York Times.

It's January 28th.

I'm Pamela Paul.

Amani Perry joins us now from outside Philadelphia.

She is the Hughes Roger Professor of African American Studies at Princeton, where she also teaches gender and sexuality studies.

And the author of several books, her most recent is called South to America, a journey below the Mason-Dixon line to understand the soul of a nation.

Amani, thanks for being here.

Thank you for having me.

So this new book is a little hard to describe because it kind of occupies several different genres.

Rather than me trying to describe it, I want to pass it over to you.

How do you think about the book in terms of what genres you're working within and your inspiration?

I guess the most immediate precedent for the book would be Albert Murray's 1971 South to a very old place,

which there's over 100-year-old tradition of people writing books that are journeys through the South,

but what Murray did and what really inspired me is he went back to his homeland.

He had moved up north, he went back home, and tried to understand both how it had changed.

You know, this is like immediately post-civil rights movements out, and also the way it had remained the same.

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