Book Description

New York Times Bestseller: This insightful and deeply personal portrait of African American working-class life “offers something so authentic . . . compelling” (Charleston Post and Courier). Part memoir, part historical and cultural analysis, My Vanishing Country is an eye-opening journey through the South’s past, present, and future. Anchored in Bakari Sellers’ hometown of Denmark, South Carolina, My Vanishing Country illuminates the pride and pain that continues to fertilize the soil of one of the poorest states in the nation. He traces his father’s rise to become a friend of Stokely Carmichael and Martin Luther King, civil rights hero, and member of the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), in the process exploring the plight of the South’s dwindling rural black working class—many of whom can trace their ancestry back for seven generations. In his poetic personal history, we are awakened to the crisis affecting the other “forgotten men and women,” seldom acknowledged by the media. For Sellers, these are his family members, neighbors, and friends. He humanizes the struggles that shape their lives—to gain access to healthcare as rural hospitals disappear; to make ends meet as the factories they have relied on shut down and move overseas; to hold on to precious traditions as their towns erode; to forge a path forward without succumbing to despair. My Vanishing Country is also a love letter to fatherhood—to Sellers’ father, his lodestar, whose life lessons have shaped him, and to his newborn twins, who he hopes will embrace the Sellers family name and honor its legacy. “An engaging memoir.” —Kirkus Reviews “Family trauma—even inherited trauma—can take a tremendous toll on children. But as Bakari Sellers makes plain in My Vanishing Country, family trauma can also be a source of strength.” —BookPage