Diane McWhorter’s 2001 Pulitzer Prize–winning masterpiece, Carry Me Home, will exhaust you. Yes, it is a dense 700-page read about the civil rights movement in Birmingham, Ala. But more important, it will exhaust you emotionally. On Sept. 15, 1963, McWhorter was a white girl living in Birmingham, almost the same age as four black girls killed by a bomb at the 16th Street Baptist Church. McWhorter was too young and too sheltered to understand what was happening at the time. (The only direct repercussion she experienced from the bombing was that her school’s Music Manrehearsals were canceled.) In a way, this book serves as her attempt at redemption. The story of Birmingham is the story of Klansmen, sanctioned police brutality and racism so ingrained in Southern culture that even Martin Luther King Jr. wasn’t sure he could beat it. “All those marches,” McWhorter writes, “just for the right to eat a hot dog at a lunch counter.”