Jimmy Carter In Plains Book Endorsement by Grant Hayter Menzies

Endorsement for Jimmy Carter in Plains: The Presidential Hometown

Though it may sound as if I'm stating the obvious when I say I wrote Lillian Carter: A Compassionate Life after falling in love with President Jimmy Carter's mother and all she stood for, that is only partly true.  I also fell in love with Plains, Georgia, the little Sumter County town where her son would make history in 1976.

Miss Lillian herself loved Plains with a depth and breadth even she, no stranger to eloquence, was unable to fully define.  As I wrote in my book, Lillian loved not just "the straight-backed pines, the snowy dollops of cotton and the little russet hills of turned peanuts; the pink and purple sunsets and the way night falls impenetrably dark as dreamless sleep", but also something else: "a special, unique something which flows through Plains like a slow, silent southern river, a quiet music you can never hear if you're just passing through."  It was the place where she, who had traveled the world, would rather be, she said, than anywhere else in the world.  I, who have traveled the world, didn't understand this till I went there myself.

When I picked up Robert Buccatello's gloriously illustrated new book, Jimmy Carter in Plains: The Presidential Hometown, I fell in love with the town all over again.  Of course, the history of the Carter family permeates the place.  It's a history reaching back almost two centuries, encompassing land grants and plantations and slaves as well as President Carter's Depression-era childhood as soon of a woman who, in her words, refused to recognize a color line, whose compassionate care for black families in the area helped build the character and compassion of our 39th president and global humanitarian.  But Plains, as described above, has its own special, unique something.  And you have to be there to understand, and to fall in love with it yourself.

Plains has served as crucible for both past and future; and where the two have collided, the future tends to win.  Yet the best of the past remains: the charming simplicity, the neighborliness of a kinder, more trusting era, and that bracing air of compassion for the less fortunate--those hungering in spirit as much as in body--the afterglow of which Miss Lillian left behind and which Mr. Jimmy continues to tend for all who will partake.  There is a magic in Plains you will not only scarcely believe when you go there to experience it, but a magic you will wonder you took so long to embrace, and I would urge you to do so whenever you can.  Before you do, though, get yourself a copy of Robert Buccatello's book.  It is a moving map to the heart of the town that made Jimmy Carter.  It is also a map to a place that will win your heart for good, and for the goodness that is Jimmy Carter's Plains.

Grant Hayter-Menzies