Review: Coming of Age: the journey of a Southern teenager, the inception of Civil Rights
Rating: 5 out of 5
Date: 02 18, 2014
It is a rather shaking experience to see a new book by an author who made such and impression, especially of those of us who severed in the Vietnam war in any capacity, when he published his vitriolic and terrifically powerful and well observed novel about that heinous mistake of a war - YEAR OF THE MONKEY. But here he is almost 25 years later with another incisive exploration of the way the human mind under duress continues to function - or malfunction. Born in Alabama, Ron Argo began his career in journalism in 1968 by falling into the draft to be sent to Vietnam where he gathered the stories that continue to haunt us today. After returning stateside he continued his studies in San Diego State University and the University of Arizona and eventually his response to his memoires of the Vietnam atrocity resulted in the 1989 publication of that important war novel. He is a prize-winning journalist and photographer and continues to write about the troubling inconsistencies of life as we are living it. In this current novel he explores the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s - a gruesome coexisting time frame as the Vietnam War. It is equally stunning as that initial book.Ron Argo brings the same degree of forceful commentary blended with exceptional storytelling to refocus our attention on another aspect of our history we should review, study, remember, and correct. Beginning his traversal of the Civil Rights Movement in 1958 we meet 14 year olds Sonny Poe and Herman Brown outside of their town of Woodstock, Alabama where they witness a beating and lynching of a black lad by the KKK. Sonny has always lived in poverty and being a free-spirited white boy he has never seen the subjugation of blacks. He has no use for segregation but is forced to discover the cruelties of the white supremacists and sides with a Dr. Joe in the doctor's struggle to bring an end to segregation in general and KKK and white supremacist brutality in particular. Their paired struggle in a town where the most vile aspects of the war against blacks eventually leads them through the seeds of the Civil Rights Movement results in their being the target of the supremacists and are falsely arrested, beaten and in essence live in the zone suffered by the blacks. The book parallels the steps and incidents of the Civil Rights Movement in the heart of the South and rarely has it been communicated so vividly.One of the reasons Ron Argo's writing stings is his journalistic delineation of every aspect of his writing: these are not only characters that he has constructed, these are also maladies of a world inept at coping with mental states we cannot understand and thus avoid. For those who love historic novels, this is a must read. For those who care to venture into unknown psychological racial dysfunction, pay very close attention here. Grady Harp, February 14