Jason Sokol's first book, There Goes My Everything: White Southerners in the Age of Civil Rights, was released by Alfred A. Knopf on August 22, 2006.

Reviews

Praise for Jason Sokol's There Goes My Everything:

One of Jonathan Yardley's 10 best books of 2006.

Choice Outstanding Academic Title Award.

One of the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette's best books of 2006.

"It's difficult not to approach Sokol's book with sheer astonishment that it has been written by one so young...but in truth, just about any scholar in the field would be happy to claim There Goes My Everything as his or her own work."

--Jonathan Yardley, Washington Post Book World
Read the full review

"A young historian provides a fascinating and remarkably empathetic assessment of how white southerners experienced the civil-rights movement."

--The Atlantic

"It's as eye-opening a look at race relations in the Civil Rights Era as anything this side of Dr. King's own Letter From a Birmingham Jail."

--Arkansas Democrat-Gazette

"Sokol provides a kaleidoscopic portrait of Southern whites in the age of Jim Crow's collapse."

--Boston Globe

"There Goes My Everything is a richly documented, often compellingly dramatic narrative, whose strength is its absence of polemic....It's not that Mr. Sokol is sympathetic to bigots, but that he understands their humanity, that the roots of hatred and ignorance can be deep and obscure. It's a book that celebrates a change brought about by striking at those roots."

--The Dallas Morning News

"This is one of the few books about the civil rights movement of the United States that gets it right....Sokol weaves historical analysis with firsthand accounts. The result is simply stunning....It is an important book and one that deserves to be read by every American."

--Tucson Citizen

"The major premise of this book is extraordinarily important. Sokol recognizes that the full dimensions of the civil rights movement can only be grasped if Southern whites...are incorporated into the master narrative. His book, therefore, points the way to a fuller, more satisfying history of one of the most important dramas of 20th Century America."

--Chicago Tribune

"Sokol likes to let his sources speak for themselves -- giving them the freedom to get their meaning across and his readers the freedom to grasp it. And there's a profound historical insight hidden in the variety of voices.... Sokol's book is most interesting when he finds white Southerners dancing back and forth between extremes.... Sokol makes a solid case that contradictory white motives opened up opportunities that black Southerners could exploit to their own advantage."

--The Nation

"Sokol offers a rich, varied story of how different individuals reacted to the revolutionary changes surrounding them. It is a complex...story told very well. There Goes My Everything belongs on the same bookshelf with the other outstanding works on the most wonderful and transforming movement of twentieth century America."

--Lucas A. Powe, Jr., University of Texas Law School

"Sokol is an elegant, engaging writer, and he approaches his subjects with empathy, if not always sympathy."

--Nashville Scene

"His book spills with complex and nuanced stories culled from oral histories, newspaper archives, unpublished letters...details piled upon details told with a storyteller's skill. It takes you from classrooms to soda fountains to church pews."

--Springfield (Mass.) Republican

"Never again will scholars be able to characterize white Southerners as a monolithic bloc that uniformly opposed the black fight for civil rights. There Goes My Everything gives whites who lived through one of the most influential social and political transformations in American history the attention they so richly deserve."

--Georgia Historical Quarterly

"Jason Sokol's book...is an ambitious attempt to describe the attitudinal changes that the civil rights revolution engendered in white southerners....He has many interesting and insightful things to say."

--Nicholas Lemann, The New Republic

"Sokol handles the material so well -- the personalities and the large stakes found in the smallest of places....'There Goes My Everything' is stark in its portrayal of racism and spirited in its celebration of large and small victories toward freedom for all."

--Minneapolis Star-Tribune

"To his credit, Sokol...never judges his subjects, and instead concentrates on exploring the book's chief theme...the divide between conscious, moral choice and human fallibility."

--San Francisco Chronicle

"An apt and even arresting narration of the ways that the white South included hard and soft racism, iron certainty and deep doubt."

--David Roediger, The Chronicle of Higher Education

"Sokol never apologizes or attempts to mitigate the often brutal and violent consequences of Southern racism. His eloquent presentation, with all of its complications, provides an invaluable and much-needed addition to our understanding of how the Civil Rights movement was actually lived."

--Publishers Weekly

"The author seeks no more and no less than to catalog these manifold reactions, understand their reasons and implications, and thereby enable a more nuanced view of history and its present repercussions ."

--Boldtype

"A well-conceived study of the changes...that swept the white South as its privileged position came under challenge in the Civil Rights era....A valuable complement to Taylor Branch's At Canaan's Edge (2006) and Diane McWhorter's Carry Me Home (2001)."

--Kirkus Reviews

"In focusing largely on the perspectives of common men and women across the states of the former Confederacy--businessmen, teachers, ministers, housewives, small-town politicians, officers of the law--he makes visceral the convulsions produced when most everything white southerners believed about blacks proved mistaken... Sokol's case study of the 9th Ward, in particular his portrayal of those parents who braved ranting mobs to enroll their white children in integrated schools, vividly captures the turmoil of a community divided against itself...Thanks to Jason Sokol, we now have a richer understanding of the hard, soul-searching journey undertaken by southern whites to get on the right side of black freedom."

--Weekly Standard

"Jason Sokol...is determined that we not forget how far the South had to go to expel the poison of racism. He does not rely on...memory to remind us how widespread such thinking was, but presents his evidence - oral histories from libraries and universities across the South, books and articles on the civil rights era, and a paper trail of apparently thousands of records left from the period... He means to let no skeptic get away unpersuaded."

--Roy Reed, The Wilson Quarterly

"As it turns out, Sokol knows quite a bit about the South. In fact, particularly for one so young, his book is remarkably prescient....the depth and nuance of what Sokol does capture in his new book is nothing short of breathtaking."

--"Young Yankee Plumbs Psyche of White South," Tuscaloosa News

"This debut...is an insightful, incisive analysis of a critical period of change in American history...Sokol offers an original and penetrating perspective on what all too often is assumed to be one singular progression."

--Library Journal

"There Goes My Everything is a story neither of triumph nor tragedy -- though it contains both -- but a story whose most insistent moral is that there's more of the story left to be told."

--Daniel Oppenheimer, Valley Advocate (Mass.)

"The marvelous There Goes My Everything...is eminently readable, sometimes surprising, often blunt...provoking and thoroughly excellent...This is an important and overdue book."

--Blue Ridge Business Journal (Va.)

"Jason Sokol...offers a deeply researched and superbly written chronicle....It is a sensitive, nuanced, and balanced look at how Southern whites dealt with one of the most remarkable...social revolutions of modern times....Readers looking for moral certainties or for reinforcement of popular stereotypes of white Southerners will find Sokol? account disappointing?nd this is precisely the book? strength."

--American Heritage

"This is a well-written, intelligent, and nicely researched study of white southerners' responses to the civil rights movement over time.... Sokol's is skillful and interesting work."

--Journal of American History

"There Goes My Everything is...reminiscent of Diane McWhorter's Pulitzer Prize-winning Carry Me Home..... The way There Goes My Everything upends the traditional social history paradigm and disabuses readers of stereotypes about white Southerners is what ultimately commends it to readers..... Writers who come after him should be indebted to Mr. Sokol for freshly plowing old ground."

--National Catholic Reporter

"This exceptionally well-balanced first book by Cornell University Professor Jason Sokol....shows there is no stereotyping that fits the varied responses of Southern whites....Sokol explains, outlines and gives clarity to the nuances."

--Decatur (Ala.) Daily

"Sokol...offers the best social history of white southerners in the civil rights era in this splendidly researched and written account....Superb....Essential."

--Choice

"Sokol's work is welcome. It's a lively book that strips away the stereotypical image of massive resistance to reveal the more complex human drama of the era."

--Creative Loafing Charlotte

"Sokol illustrates the complexity of the human drama behind the civil rights movement....This is a fascinating look at a side of the civil rights movement that has not been...widely explored."

--Booklist