What makes Theroux's take on the Deep South so fascinating, is the erudition that he brings to his travels.

Thoreaux is arguably America's most traveled travel-writer with years of experience writing, traveling and living in Africa and Asia. When he makes comparisons in the book, he is far more likely to tie observations to Mozambique or Tanzania than to his native New England.

And Theroux's observations are canny. Sticking to the backroads of the South, he fixes his base to Organgeburg, SC; Greensboro, AL (a short ride from Tuscaloosa); and Vicksburg, MS. Revisiting these areas over the couse of three seasons in a calendar year--during the fourth season, summer, he hops across the Mississippi to Arkansas, where he circumnavigates the state, talking to people and focusing on black farmers.

Theroux's focus is poverty--a focus probably too relentless for any "proper" southerner to consider. His key contacts are non-profit managers who describe conditions in their run-down towns and put him in touch with people whom he can profile. Theroux does his due duty in the pews of churches and in the aisles of gun shows in many of the towns he visits. He does peripheral takes on a University of Alabama football game and the Aiken (SCS) Steeplechase, but he doesn't profile these very thoroughly.

Here's his take on the Alabama Crimson Tide:

Reflecting on the Crimson Tide, I ceased to think of it as football at all, except in a superficial way; it seemed much more like another Southern reaction to a feeling of defeat, with some of the half-buried emotion I'd noticed at gun shows. In a state that is so hard-pressed, with one of the highest poverty rates in the nation, with its history of racial conflict, and with so litte to boast about yet wishing tomatter, it is natural that a winning team--a national champion--would attract people in need of meaning or a self-esteem in their lives, and would become the basis of a classic in-group.

While Thoreaux's thoughts are insightful--he publishes intermediate chapters on Souther Literature that are enlightening--I think he misses the key rationale for the entrenched Southern cultural system. He wonders why the U.S. government can invest tens of millions in Africa but very little in Mississippi, why the Clinton Global Initative invests billions around the world but very little in the president's home state of Arkansas.

The fact is that Southern elites have the very genteel backwards South that they have always wanted. Outside money--whether it came from the federal government or the Clintons--is unwelcome because it puts the social structure at risk. America's current class of wealthy blacks have made their money in the North or on the West Coast (or increasingly in booming southern cities like Atlanta, Charlotte and Nashville). Theroux finds that even the transfer of political power in Greensboro, Alabama, where 2/3rd of the residents are black, is disconcerting to the genteel whites he finds there.

All in all, a fascinating book. I highly recommend it.