Memoir

In the Deep South of the 1950s, journalist John Howard Griffin decided to cross the color line. Using medication that darkened his skin to deep brown, he exchanged his privileged life as a Southern white man for the disenfranchised world of an unemployed black man. His audacious, still chillingly relevant eyewitness history is a work about race and humanity-that in this new millennium still has something important to say to every American.

"...a Syrian political prisoner of conscience, an atheist mistaken for a radical Islamist - the worst kind of enemy of the state - who was locked up for 14 years without a trial. Shunned by his fellow inmates, Musa remains silent and mostly unspoken-to for the duration of his incarceration. A young film school graduate at the start, he is a defiant and stoic narrator, somehow able to pick out humor and irony in the shocking events and the characters he describes. Yet even the strongest personality cannot hold out under such brutal conditions forever..."—Back cover.