RaveNew York Times Book ReviewHow the song so captured these people and a wider world, is the haunting question that the native Kentuckian Emily Bingham answers so thoroughly and forcefully in My Old Kentucky Home, her history of an American song ... This book is more than just a kind of archaeological deep dig; it attempts a reckoning, a kind that many Southerners, especially, will recognize and understand, because they have long been searching for something like it themselves ... The song is a thing from antiquity, yes, but in 2022, in an America at war with itself, this book seems to arrive just in time. Bingham, in her words, scrubs off some of that burned cork to see what is underneath ... Her book offers its readers the same choice, between understanding and sweet nostalgia, between the splinters and thorns of history and about the worst thing people can do to one another, and a smooth, thin, polished veneer.
