Delving into the life of Memphis photographer Ernest Withers, popular historian Preston Lauterbach...offers readers a new vantage point on a pivotal time in United States history. His fastidious research, storytelling skills and passion for the subject make Bluff City an engrossing, fascinating biography that reads like an espionage thriller ... Bluff City is emotionally stirring. Lauterbach expertly blends the passions of the period with the seeming betrayal of a hero. He details the complexities of the man and the movement, bringing out all the shades of gray necessary to understand the whole picture. This is a snapshot of U.S. history taken from a rare perspective, and the accompanying photographs from Withers's estate perfectly enhance Lauterbach's writing.

Big stretches of Withers’s life get a fairly cursory look, and Lauterbach basically calls it a day after King’s assassination in 1968, dispatching the photographer’s subsequent four decades in an introductory chapter and an afterword. Nor is this a book about photography history, examining the photographs the way an art historian might ... Instead what Lauterbach...is going for is a loose, rangy history of the civil rights movement in Memphis, using Withers and his camera as the (literal) lens. He’s done the work, tracking the complex, intertwined dances of the radicals and the centrists, the local ministers and visiting heavyweights like King. Weirdly, though, his very thoroughness and deep interest in this time and place have the almost certainly unintended effect of diminishing Withers rather than keeping him front and center ... Bluff City may not get to Withers’s inner life, but it is not without pleasure. Lauterbach is justifiably sympathetic to his subject ... In his first chapter, he describes a day in 2005 when he dropped by Withers’s studio for a tour and got a lift home from the photographer in that old sedan. 'He drove—in a manner many people familiar with Memphis will recognize — slowly, drifting right.' That kind of describes his book, too.

... not only an epithet for Memphis, but a fair description of Withers’ complex life ... Bluff City does a masterful job of telling the story of civil rights in Memphis in the 1960s, framing it with Withers’ biography, and culminating with the sanitation workers’ strike that would bring King to town — and to his death. Not only is it a great narrative, it’s also a reminder, in these polarised times, that moral complexity is baked into human affairs, and that sometimes people do the wrong thing for what they perceive is the right reason.

...Lauterbach...do[es] a good job of establishing the mood of the times and the context in which...principal characters operated, shedding light—the little there is to shed—on Withers’s possible motivation for cooperating with the FBI ... Mr. [Marc] Perrusquia’s dogged work [in A Spy in Canaan] made Mr. Lauterbach’s book possible. Mr. Lauterbach, though, provides a better feel for life in Memphis, where the crime and corruption were as pervasive as the hospitality. He also gives a more thoughtful analysis of Withers’s talent as a photographer ... Mr. Lauterbach’s recounting of the 1968 'I Am a Man' garbage strike in Memphis—where Martin Luther King was present—is riveting, capturing the mounting tensions that finally resulted in violence ... Mr. Lauterbach...asks perhaps the most pertinent question of all: 'Is it our task now to decide how a black person should have navigated a racist world?'

When it was reported in 2010 that famed civil rights photographer Ernest Withers was an FBI informant, friends and supporters still living may have thought the worst of him as a traitor whose information about the so-called agitators led to intimidation and far worse. By combining a wide-ranging context with narrative intensity, Lauterbach...hopes to correct the record. Eschewing a clean biographical arc, he instead parses the sociopolitical circumstances ... With previously unpublished photographs taken by Withers, Lauterbach provides a fresh, balanced, and provocative exploration of the photographer’s life and controversial choices.

Although the author succeeds in capturing the tensions of the era, the FBI plot fails to jell ... This fascinating glimpse behind the creation of iconic civil rights photos never quite flushes out the main thesis exploring Withers's FBI informant career. Marc Perrusquia's A Spy in Canaan offers a more thorough exploration

Lauterbach...illuminates the life of African-American photojournalist Ernest Withers ... Lauterbach tells a fantastic story of a brilliant and compromised artist living in challenging and divisive times.