HOLY GROUND

A tireless advocate for civil rights takes stock of the current moment.

Flowers, founder of the Center for Rural Enterprise and Environmental Justice and recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship, writes with passion and gracefulness about her life and experiences as an advocate for the rural poor. While she is best known for her work to secure safe water and sanitation for people living near toxic conditions, Flowers recounts a varied and fascinating career of advocacy for marginalized communities, full of encounters with politicians and other notable figures. Flowers includes pointed analyses of reproductive liberty, the neglect of the rural poor, the cowardice of politicians, and the avarice of the wealthy, along with absorbing personal reflections on the power of religious faith, community, food, and the pain of personal loss. She is unapologetically progressive in her political commitments, heaping withering scorn on the Tennessee legislators who censured Black legislators for speaking out against gun violence after the Covenant School shootings and on the Republicans who rushed to restrict reproductive freedom after the Supreme Court overruled Roe v. Wade. Yet she includes surprising sympathetic assessments of staunch conservatives such as Trump’s attorney general, Jeff Sessions, and Republican Senator Tommy Tuberville, suggesting that sensitivity to the plight of the rural poor—a group often forgotten by urban progressives—can cross ideological divides. The book is a collection of essays rather than a chronologically organized autobiography, but it coheres in both tone and substance.

A passionate and thoughtful exploration of social injustice.