An Education in Georgia: Charlayne Hunter, Hamilton Holmes, and the Integration of the University of Georgia » (1st Edition)

A humorist in the tradition of Mark Twain and Robert Benchley, Calvin Trillin has been offering up his sly observations to magazine readers for decades, as a political "doggerelist" (The Deadline Poet) and columnist (Uncivil Liberties). He has also uncapped his pen to discuss the joys of family life and the pleasures of chasing down the perfect meal. Anna Quindlen, writing in her New York Times column in 1991, called him a man who disembowels pomp with such a good-natured sword.

In January 1961, following eighteen months of litigation that culminated in a federal court order, Hamilton Holmes and Charlayne Hunter became the first black students to enter the University of Georgia. Calvin Trillin, then a reporter for Time Magazine, attended the court fight that led to the admission of Holmes and Hunter and covered their first week at the university--a week that began in relative calm, moved on to a riot and the suspension of the two students "for their own safety," and ended with both returning to the campus under a new court order.

Shortly before their graduation in 1963, Trillin came back to Georgia to determine what their college lives had been like. He interviewed not only Holmes and Hunter but also their families, friends, and fellow students, professors, and university administrators. The result was this book--a sharply detailed portrait of how these two young people faced coldness, hostility, and occasional understanding on a southern campus in the midst of a great social change.

Clarence Petersen

Thirty years ago, when African-Americans were called Negroes and college students were called boys and girls, Trillin was a reporter for Time assigned to cover the story of Negroes Charlayne Hunter (now Hunter-Gault) and Hamilton Homes' admission to the University of Georgia by order of a federal court. This book was the result, and you will need no recommendation from me if you read this from the new foreword by Hunter-Gault, who became national correspondent for the MacNeil/Lehrer report: "I learned from Bud (Trillin) that reporters have to go where the story takes them, whether into the middle of an angry white mob or to the pew of a black church in some out-of-the way southern town during an over-long civil rights rally-listening and observing, ever alert to the ridiculous or the sublime." That's Trillin all right, and that's why this book is so compelling. Chicago Tribune as seen in the Herald-Republic, Yakima WA