OL' BOY GETS SOME 'ATTA' BOYS!: FROM IRA BERLIN'S REVIEW OF "AWAY DOWN SOUTH" IN THE WASHINGTON POST

The gang is all here: big players such as Thomas Jefferson and Tom Watson, William Gilmore Simms and William Faulkner, Broadus Mitchell and Margaret Mitchell, and W.J. Cash and W.E.B. DuBois, as well as bit players such as the planter Bennehan Cameron, the academic Rollin G. Osterweis and the social activist Julia Tutwiler. The stock figures of Southern literature -- Jeeter Lester, Ike McCaslin, Willie Stark and Will Varner -- mix with the real figures of Southern history. (Sometimes it seemed they were kinfolk.) Patricians and parvenus, idealists and materialists, fading gentry and rising industrialists, and modernists and anti-modernists tumble off Cobb's pages. They construct great causes and lost causes, love the landscape and despoil the land, fill their purses and save their souls, and often elevate the idea of womanhood while debasing women themselves. The inhabitants of Away Down South come at us thick and fast, benighted and bemused, roaring down some unpaved back-country road, pedal to the metal. If this sounds like a breathless rendition of Southern history by an academic who loves to name names, it certainly is. Still, no one remotely interested in the South will be able to resist this book, and readers are bound to learn from Cobb's enormous erudition.