ARKANSAS DEMOCRAT-GAZETTE
The solemnly friendly and sympathetic tone of that engagement informs the remarkable book that Jacoway has now finally completed. Turn Away Thy Son is a magnificent book that more than justifies its long gestation. This is a book that could only have been written by an insider, and yet it is a book that does not suffer from the self-absorption that ordinarily characterizes insider literature... Full Review

THE WASHINGTON POST
Turn Away Thy Son, then, offers a different view of the governor and a sexy angle on the entire Little Rock crisis. There is no discovery here that will require us to rewrite the drama's history, but this book is a reminder of the sexual tension behind many of the nation's debates about race... Full Review

DALLAS MORNING NEWS
Turn Away Thy Son: Little Rock, the Crisis That Shocked the Nation, is a brilliant account that ranks as the single best history of the desegregation battle in Little Rock. The research is impressive, the writing often superb... Full Review

CHICAGO TRIBUNE
This is an era of big books on the history of the civil rights movement. Over the past year, publishers have brought us a comprehensive study of the Freedom Riders; the capstone to Taylor Branch's magisterial trilogy, America in the King Years; and two new major studies of Martin Luther King Jr. Elizabeth Jacoway's contribution to this genre has the distinct advantage of being written by someone who is a trained scholar and, while not exactly a participant in the events she describes, was a bystander. As a sheltered, 13-year-old white in Little Rock, Jacoway remained blissfully unaware of the turmoil around her. Indeed, her book is a testament to her own later 'intellectual awakening' and her effort to reclaim a past denied by her social upbringing. In confessing that she had 'mindlessly participated in and benefited from a racist culture,' Jacoway invites others to realize the same. Turn Away Thy Son is organized loosely around the key personalities, white and black, who played central roles in the Little Rock crisis. Jacoway enlivens her text with a host of moving anecdotes and colorful characters, among them the liberal editor of the Arkansas Gazette, Harry Ashmore. The pugnacious editor maintained a faith that progressive-minded Southern businessmen, intent on modernizing their region, would usher in a new day of liberalization. Yet as late as 1951, even he remained devoted to the principle of private social segregation while insisting on the abolition of public discrimination against blacks." -- Alex Lichtenstein ... Full Review

LIBRARY JOURNAL
"Little Rock, AK, became ground zero in September 1957 in the social revolution that was U.S. public school desegregation. For the 50th anniversary of the crisis, independent Ph.D.-trained historian Jacoway extends her earlier Understanding the Little Rock Crisis(coauthored with Fred Williams), focusing on primary figures involved between 1957 and 1959. She thus personalizes the advent, events, and aftermath of fearful cultural change through which she lived as the white teenage niece of the city's superintendent of schools. Applauding the white leadership that found ways to accommodate the blacks who resolutely insisted on equal civil rights, she ends on a note of unfinished business in a re-segregated America. Copiously documented, Jacoway's detailed, engaging narrative of personal and political costs of changing attitudes centers the deepest sources of segregationist behavior in sexual taboos and an orthodoxy of white superiority and racial caste. Comparable with Diane McWhorter's acclaimed Carry Me Home, this rich reconstruction is an essential read for the white side of the integration story. Highly recommended for civil rights, local, and Southern history collections.-Thomas J. Davis, Arizona State Univ., Tempe ." -- Thomas J. Davis

BOOKLIST REVIEW
" The earliest stirrings of the civil rights movement roughly coincided with the rapid increase in the number of home television sets. So, many of the searing images from Montgomery, Alabama; Philadelphia, Mississippi; and, of course, Little Rock, Arkansas, were burned into our national consciousness. In September 1957, nine black students attempted to intgrate Central High School in Little Rock, despite the opposition of Governor Orval Faubus. All over our nation, citizens saw the hate-filled mobs spewing racial epithets. Jacoway, who grew up in Little Rock during the crisis and its aftermath, has utilized numerous interviews of witnesses, politicians, students, and observers who played parts in the dramatic events at Little Rock. The result is an absorbing and surprising account that reveals our nation at its best and worst. It is also a balanced and scrupulously fair story. Faubus, demonized by many, was actually a moderate on racial issues, and he did attempt to find a middle road that would balance moral considerations with political realities. But Jacoway does not shrink from showing the ugly face of racism, motivated, in her view, by a chronic, obsessive fear of miscegenation." —Jay Freeman

KIRKUS REVIEW
"Thoughtful recounting of a fateful year-plus of desegregation in the Deep South by a native daughter. Jacoway, a historian who was just a couple of grades behind the so-called Little Rock Nine, writes with measured wonder about the state of the world during her childhood, when militant governor Orval Faubus cried totalitarianism at the federally ordered dismantling of Jim Crow educational laws and the civil-rights movement acquired a potent icon in Elizabeth Eckford, a black student who inaugurated desegregation at Little Rock's Central High, "absorbing an outpouring of white rage." Such signal moments, historians recognize, are the product of great social forces. But they are also the work of individuals, some barely remembered today, and the chief virtue of Jacoway's well-written study is its concern for individuals and small moments. Daisy Bates, for instance, the noted civil-rights activist, planned to drive the black students to Central High, where they would be surrounded by a cordon of black and white ministers who would serve as a "moral shield" against the hostile crowd. But the Eckfords did not have a telephone, and so Elizabeth unknowingly entered the lion's den of Central High alone. She was threatened with death, as was a Communist firebrand named Mrs. Lorch, who responded with threats of her own. In the meanwhile, Governor Faubus -- who had been helped into office by the pioneering integrationist reporter and editor Harry Ashmore -- had ordered the Arkansas National Guard not to keep the peace, but to keep black students away. Jacoway's narrative introduces readers to important and passing characters on both sides of the struggle, who fought bitterly as the Little Rock case went up before the Supreme Court. They fought less bitterly afterward, when most Arkansans accepted the Court's upholding of the federal desegregation mandate -- a ruling, Jacoway notes, that "left unanswered many of the procedural questions that plagued southern school boards in ensuing years." A lucid and revealing key to events of half a century ago, when moral suasion and self-interest together "trumped racist values in Arkansas's capital city" -- and beyond."

AMAZON.COM, George D. Ellis
"This wonderful piece of scholarship is not in keeping with our time. Today, we are asked to look to crack-pot talking heads on television who are experts-on-nothing with opinions on everything, and who think every issue can be reduced to an eight-second sound bite, plus three more seconds for the personal insult. This incredible work is nothing like that. Dr. Jacoway approaches the subject matter like the trained historian that she is: fairly, dispassionately, and factually. Her uncle is a key player, and even he gets no pass. This is the story of a train wreck - the Little Rock desegregation crisis. The characters are huge. There is Harry Ashmore, editor of the editorial page of the Arkansas Gazette, who was always the darling of Little Rock's goat cheese liberals, but who in fact was self-important, self-congratulatory, and self-absorbed. When he wasn't editorializing, he was giving speeches to Democratic Party groups, conduct which would be considered appalling by what little passes as journalistic standards today. There is Virgil Blossom, school superintendent (and the author's uncle) who comes across as a nervous and manic Mr. Whipple of please-don't-squeeze-the-Charmin fame. There is Congressman Brooks Hays, trying very hard to be the peace maker between Faubus and Eisenhower, but who in fact was unsuccessful in doing so, and accordingly, had to resort to making it up as he went along. There is the Establishment, school board members and attorneys, all claiming to be doing the right thing, but some of whom had noses so high in the air they would drown in a drizzle. There is Jim Johnson, a lieutenant of Gerald L.K. Smith, and an unreconstructed racist who, along with his wife, had more in common with Juan and Eva Peron than main-stream white middle class Americana. There is U.S. District Judge John Miller whose ex parte communications with the school district attorneys would get him in serious ethical trouble by today's standards. And then, there is Orval Eugene Faubus. I have often characterized Faubus as the Darth Vadar of Southern politics. This book brings that image home in a more authentic way than I had ever imagined. It reinforces the point made by Roy Reed in his magnificent biography, that Faubus's journey to the dark side was uncomplicated and breathtakingly political. Without pointing fingers, the author reports that Faubus accused Blossom and others of "double-crossing" him in publicly down-playing the facts and circumstances of the "crisis" and the extent of potential violence, thereby failing to give Faubus cover. Whether as a consequence of their public views or whether it was strictly retaliatory to gain political advantage (my personal view), or whether for some other reason, the author does not say. To do so would be an attempt to read the mind of a mastermind of politics. But,the author reports that the next thing that happened, quite literally, was Faubus's calling out the National Guard. The rest, as they say, is history. But not quite. Eisenhower sent in the 101 Airborne Division, the Little Rock Nine were escorted into the front door of Central High, and the rest is history. Well, not quite. A year later, the schools didn't open at all. Faubus was elected to a third term in a campaign uncharacteristically filled with race hatred. I say uncharacteristic because in '54 and '56, he had run as the liberal populist reformer, accused by his opponent of being a communist, with Ashmore as his chief water carrier and speech writer. Ashmore took a leave of absence from the Gazette to serve as Adlai Stevenson's spinmeister in '56. Faubus headed the Arkansas delegation to the convention, and would not deliver Arkansas's support to Stevenson on the first ballot. Ashmore remained bitter toward Faubus for years after that, and the author invites speculation, but does not opine herself, that the resentment may have been the reason for the "Ashmore-Gazette" version of events at Central High.
This is a must-read book for anyone interested in the history of the American civil rights movement. As a liberal Democrat, I had difficulty with some of the material - not because I didn't think the material was true, but because I knew in my heart and mind that it was true. But there is nothing here for the conservative, either. Those who want to go back to a time when "everybody was good" and American values were "held high" should read this book. Segregation, racial discrimination, bigotry, and hatred are not American values. There are no conservative heroes, and very few liberal heroes (Daisy Bates, Elizabeth Eckford, Wiley Branton). In the aftermath of this train wreck, bodies are strewn up and down the track. It's very bloody. History is that way sometimes."