Jimmy Carter's Hometown: People of Plains.

Jimmy Carter's Hometown: People of Plains. By Duane Hutchinson. Foreword by Jimmy Carter. (Lincoln, Neb.: Foundation Books, c. 2003. Pp. xiv, 336. $19.95, ISBN 0-934988-41-2.)

In Jimmy Carter's Hometown, Duane Hutchinson has published a compilation of edited interviews with the residents of Plains, Georgia. Ranging from the well known to the obscure, most of the twenty-two interviewees had at least some familiarity with the families of former president James Earl Carter Jr. and first lady Rosalynn Carter. Hutchinson conducted the interviews in 1976 and 1978, intending to use this material as the foundation for a biography of Carter. The onslaught of published works that followed Carter's upstart presidential victory in 1976 waylaid that intent. With many of the original subjects now deceased, Hutchinson finally decided to make these special interviews accessible to the public. Former president Carter offers a brief foreword.

Hutchinson's interviews will be of interest primarily to the residents of Plains, Georgia, who will recognize many of the names and events mentioned. For readers interested in learning something new and meaningful about the history of southern Georgia or President Carter, however, there is little of substance here. The interviews are chock-full of detail on topics ranging from cotton and peanut farming to rural education, socializing, and shopkeeping. Yet the portrait of daily life in Plains that emerges is sketchy at best and tedious and predictable at worst. For historians, good interviews often consist of a few small gems hidden in a mound of random detail. Hutchinson's work is heavy on the latter and light on the former.

Hutchinson consistently neglects to follow up important points, and he sometimes edits out remarks that imply something negative. He apparently finds no comment or detail too inconsequential to include but regards some subjects as too sensitive to touch. A few of the interviewees, for example, describe black-white relations in Plains before the civil rights movement, commenting on domestic workers, the paternalism of white employers, and segregated education. Hutchinson rarely pursues these points. One loquacious interviewee, Bob Gibson, describes the lynching of a black man in Plains when he was a boy. After including Gibson's recollections of what led up to this event, Hutchinson ends by noting that "What followed was another killing, which Bob described with pain and detail" (p. 273). Nothing more about this story appears. Gibson himself is willing to share his memories, even painful ones, in detail. Hutchinson, however, is not. This sort of editorial choice casts doubt on the merit of the work overall. Do the interviews portray what these people of Plains really thought was significant? Or do they reflect mostly what Hutchinson felt readers should believe? An author should strive to provide the former and work hard to avoid the latter. Hutchinson does not.

Still, for readers who want to sample how an older generation of south Georgians remembered their own community and the Carter family, this work might be of interest.

Tusculum College 

JENNIFER BROOKS