This book focuses on the role of the revived Ku Klux Klan in Palatka, Florida, from 1915-1930 and places it in the context of the greater social upheaval taking place in those years. Parts are horrifying. Parts are fascinating. All of it lives vividly in this presentation.

Age of Barbarity is history personalized, alternating clearly footnoted facts with dramatized fiction-style sections that display those facts with a strong seasoning of emotion. This book is history with the feel of a memoir. No doubt this is because Billy Townsend is descended from one of the men with a central role in the events reported and is able to bring a sense of the time and atmosphere that an outsider would not be able to construct.

History as a school subject tends to be treated as a list of dates and outcomes that fade once you leave the classroom. Classroom history is like looking at a coastline from 20,000 feet in the air: all the rough edges are smoothed out. This book brings you down to wave level, so that you felt the turbulance and tides battering real people who struggle, individually and as groups, with social injustice and personal danger.

I highly recommend this book to anyone interested in civil rights in this country. ( )