{ "item_title" : "The Barn", "item_author" : [" Wright Thompson "], "item_description" : "The instant New York Times bestseller - Named a Best Book of the Year by The Washington Post, Slate, Vanity Fair, TIME, Buzzfeed, Smithsonian, BookPage, KCUR, Kirkus, and Boston Globe - Nominated for a PEN America Literary AwardIt literally changed my outlook on the world...incredible. --Shonda RhimesThe Barn is serious history and skillful journalism, but with the nuance and wallop of a finely wrought novel... The Barn describes not just the poison of silence and lies, but also the dignity of courage and truth. -- The Washington Post The most brutal, layered, and absolutely beautiful book about Mississippi, and really how the world conspired with the best and worst parts of Mississippi, I will ever read...Reporting and reckoning can get no better, or more important, than this. --Kiese LaymonAn incredible history of a crime that changed America. --John GrishamWith integrity, and soul, Thompson unearths the terrible how and why, carrying us back and forth through time, deep in Mississippi--baring sweat, soil, and heart all the way through. --Imani Perry A shocking and revelatory account of the murder of Emmett Till that lays bare the long lead-up to the crime and how the truth was hidden for so longIn summer 1955, two men, Roy Bryant and J. W. Milam, were charged with the torture and murder of the fourteen-year-old Emmett Till in Money, Mississippi, and acquitted in a mockery of justice, leaving behind an ink cloud of a false confession. In The Barn, Wright Thompson reveals the true nature and location of the long night of hell that August: inside the barn of one of the killers, within the six-square-mile grid whose official name is Township 22 North, Range 4 West,Section 2, West Half, fabled in the Delta of myth as the birthplace of the blues, and twenty-three miles from Thompson's own family farm. Wright Thompson has a deep, local understanding of this story--the world of the families of both Emmett Till and his killers, the historical forces that brought them together in the same place, and how the crime came to loom so large. Putting the killing floor of the barn on the map of West Half, and the Delta, and America, is a way onto the road this country must travel if we are to heal our oldest, deepest wound.", "item_img_path" : "https://covers2.booksamillion.com/covers/bam/0/59/329/982/0593299825_b.jpg", "price_data" : { "retail_price" : "35.00", "online_price" : "35.00", "our_price" : "35.00", "club_price" : "35.00", "savings_pct" : "0", "savings_amt" : "0.00", "club_savings_pct" : "0", "club_savings_amt" : "0.00", "discount_pct" : "10", "store_price" : "35.00" } }

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The savage murder of 14-year-old Emmett Till at the hands of a group of white men outside the small town of Drew, Mississippi, on August 28, 1955, stained the nation and galvanized the Civil Rights movement. In The Barn: The Secret History of a Murder in Mississippi, noted sports journalist and Mississippi native Wright Thompson brilliantly recounts the story of that lynching, while deeply exploring the history and culture of the Mississippi Delta out of whose soil it emerged. Wright made an estimated 100 visits to the barn where Till died, a site whose location has long been shrouded in mystery. To recount the terror of Till’s final night, when he was kidnapped, tortured and shot for supposedly whistling at a white woman (a report disputed by many), Wright relies on the vivid memories of Till’s cousin Rev. Wheeler Parker Jr., who accompanied Till on the fateful trip south from Chicago and was fortunate the killers did not take his life as well. Midway through The Barn, Thompson detours from Till’s story to excavate the vivid history of the Delta’s “gumbo mud,” which includes the birth of blues music in the person of Charley Patton on a plantation some 10 miles from the barn and the activities of Confederate general Nathan Bedford Forrest, the first Grand Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan. Wright painstakingly traces the rise and fall of a hardscrabble agricultural economy, which produced both men like Till’s uncle Moses Wright, a sharecropper whose home the teenager was visiting at the time of his murder, and J.W. Milam and Roy Bryant, the two people tried (and acquitted) for Till’s murder. Thompson was raised in Clarksdale, Mississippi, near the farm Wright’s mother’s family first owned in 1913 and that it maintains to this day, and by parents who taught him to reject the bigotry that infected his home state. And so, he is acutely sensitive to his own ambivalence about what it means to be a Mississippian. “We spend so much time in the past here and yet so little time learning the history of who we are and how we got here,” he writes. The Barn is Thompson’s brave, forthright effort to begin the process of eradicating some of that ignorance.