24 Hours in Charlottesville: An Oral History of the Stand Against White Supremacy

That the 2017 Unite the Right rally—in which “hundreds of white supremacists and neo-Nazis” paraded through the streets of Charlottesville, Va., shouting “Jews will not replace us!”—descended into “extreme violence” should not have been a surprise, according to this visceral history of the protest and its aftermath. Drawing on dozens of interviews with journalists, residents, and activists, CNN producer Neus (coauthor, Muhammad Najem, War Reporter) reveals that police and municipal officials ignored repeated warnings that people might get hurt and seemed to offer more accommodations to the rally’s organizers than to counterprotesters. Interviewees also delve into the city’s racial dynamics (“It’s a very beautiful place, physically, with a very ugly underside, of poverty, inequality”) and the “very whitewashed version of American history” taught at the University of Virginia. Some of the book’s most powerful testimony comes from the mother of Heather Heyer, who was killed when a white supremacist slammed his car into a crowd of counterprotesters. Neus’s ground-up approach paints the violence as a slow-motion catastrophe that could have been avoided, though the free speech issues involved get somewhat short shrift. Still, this is a moving and frequently enraging look at how the tragedy unfolded. (July)