Valeria Palmer

This book starts out with lies. I have lived in Georgia and South Carolina for most of the last 45 years. It has been ar least 30 years since I heard anyone use racial pejoratives openly as he purports to have heard from.people within instants of.meeting them. Additionally, his portrait of Allendale SC contains a flat out mistruth. He claims there are no motels left in this struggling town, yet I know from driving through there regularly, that there are at least 2 and a national chain has a unit only 12 miles away or so. No one has to drive 30 plus miles to Orangeburg to find a bed for the night. His use of dialect by both black and white of offensive. While many people in the Lowcountry speak Gullah in family situations,.most South Carolinians of all colors speak fairly standard English with some southernisms. As someone who came to SC in her teens courtesy of the US Army but who was raised by two Yankee from just outside Boston, Mr. Theroux's characterizations of the South are trite stereotypes that I suppose he simply could not resist trotting out for this book. But he's lying. The things he presents as truth as of 2015 are some weird amalgam of imagination, 40 year old history and what appears to be malice.