Seeking to come to terms with the haunting memories of his childhood in the deep South-Charles Marsh has crafted a memoir of small-town Southern life caught up in the whirlwind of the Civil Rights movement. As minister of the First Baptist Church in Laurel, Mississippi, Charles Marsh's father Bob Marsh, was a prominent man who was beloved by the community. But Laurel was also home to Sam Bowers, the Imperial Wizard of the White Knights of the Mississippi KKK and the director of their daily, unchallenged installments of terror and misery. Bowers was known and tolerated by the entire white community of Laurel. This included Bob Marsh, who struggled to do the right thing while reeling between righteous indignation and moral torpor, only slowly awakening to fear, suffering, and guilt over his unwillingness to take a public stand against Bowers. At the same time, The Last Days examines the collision of worlds once divided-white Protestant conservatism, the African American struggle for civil rights, and late 1960s counter culture-that propelled the dramatic changes in everyday life in a small Southern town. The Last Days: A Son's Story of Sin and Segregation at the Dawn of a New South offers a compelling new version of an old story: how good people acquiesce to evil, and then find strength to overcome it. At his best, author Charles Marsh ( God's Long Summer ) recalls the elegiac prose of Southern writers such as Harper Lee. His memoir begins radiantly: One spring afternoon in 1967, when the warm Alabama air was perfumed with honeysuckle and scuppernong, my father and I were walking along a dirt path through fields of green wiregrass. With his hand brushing lightly against my shoulders, he told me the Lord was calling us to Mississippi, to blessings more abundant than we could ever imagine. In Laurel, Mississippi, Bob Marsh, a prominent Baptist preacher, took the pulpit of a comfortable congregation in a comfortable town where the leading citizens included Sam Bowers, the Imperial Wizard of the White Knights of the Ku Klux Klan. Lulled by the luxuries of the good life, Reverend Marsh and his congregation initially believed the civil rights movement was a political matter, not a spiritual one. The slow erosion of their prejudice and dawning of enlightenment is precisely and graciously detailed in The Last Days . The book is also a fine and poignantly humorous evocation of many aspects of daily life in a small Southern town in the late 1960s and early 1970s. In a chapter called "The Joy of Fundamentalist Sex," one of Marsh's classmates pulls a pornographic picture from his wallet at the playground at school, and Marsh gazes on the forbidden fruit uncomprehendingly: "All I could figure was a soupy labyrinth of okra spears and woody knots angling over a blond stew." --Michael Joseph Gross Marsh, religion professor at the University of Virginia and director of the Project on Theology and Community, is also the author of God's Long Summer: Stories of Faith and Civil Rights (1997). In The Last Days , Marsh looks back at his own childhood, examining how his family and its Laurel, Mississippi, neighbors dealt with the challenges of the civil rights movement. Marsh's father brought the family to Laurel in 1967, when he was appointed minister of the town's First Baptist Church. Two miles away was Sambo Amusement Company, the headquarters of the White Knights of the Ku Klux Klan of Mississippi and base of operations for its founder and Imperial Wizard, Sam Bowers. Marsh's memoir travels back in time to outline the parents' backgrounds, and then explores the world Marsh entered when the family moved to Mississippi--from 1967 to the 1970-71 court-ordered integration of Laurel's public schools and on to Marsh's final teenage years in the town. This nuanced memoir seeks to come to accept his beloved father's inability to make certain social changes in the 1960s as well as appreciate those he did make. Mary Carroll Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved ". . .[an] intimate and well-written memoir. . ." -- --Publishers Weekly [3/5/2001] "A moving book about courage among so-called ordinary people." -- -- The Dallas Morning News [6/10/01] "More than a spellbinding account of this horrendous moment in Southern history... a stunning portrait of family love." -- --Dennis Covington, _Salvation on Sand Mountain_ "Reminiscences of growing up white and middle-class in the Deep South during the late 1960s . . . with disarming candor and wit." -- -Kirkus Reviews [2/5/2001] "This memoir takes readers through an intense journey of faith and redemption . . ." -- -Charles Reagan Wilson, Director, Center for the Study of Southern Culture, University of Mississippi "With humor and without moral grandstanding, [Marsh] depicts an emotional time of conflict in the South." -- --The Commercial Appeal [3/27/2001] Charles Marsh teaches religion at the University of Virginia and is Director of the Projec