Born on October 1, 1924, Jimmy Carter grew up on a Georgia farm during the Great Depression. In An Hour Before Daylight, the former president tells the story of his rural boyhood, and paints a sensitive portrait of America before the civil rights movement.

Carter describes--in glorious, if sometimes gory, detail--growing up on a farm where everything was done by either hand or mule: plowing fields, "mopping" cotton to kill pests, cutting sugar cane, shaking peanuts, or processing pork. He also describes the joys of walking barefoot ("this habit alone helped to create a sense of intimacy with the earth"), taking naps with his father on the porch after lunch, and hunting with slingshots and boomerangs with his playmates--all of whom were black. Carter was in constant contact with his black neighbors; he worked alongside them, ate in their homes, and often spent the night in the home of Rachel and Jack Clark, "on a pallet on the floor stuffed with corn shucks," when his parents were away. However, this intimacy was possible only on the farm. When young Jimmy and his best friend, A.D. Davis, went to town to see a movie, they waited for the train together, paid their 15 cents, and then separated into "white" and "colored" compartments. Once in Americus, they walked to the theater together, but separated again, with Jimmy buying a seat on the main floor or first balcony at the front door, and A.D. going around to the back door to buy his seat up in the upper balcony. After the movie, they returned home on another segregated train. "I don't remember ever questioning the mandatory racial separation, which we accepted like breathing or waking up in Archery every morning."

In this warm, almost sepia-toned narrative, Carter describes his relationships with his parents and with the five people--only two of whom were white--who most affected his early life. Best of all, however, Carter presents his sweetly nostalgic recollections of a lost America. --Sunny Delaney


From AudioFile
Not since Abraham Lincoln have Americans become as familiar with another humble U.S. President raised in the heart of farm country as they are with Jimmy Carter. Carter revisits his Depression-era childhood growing up in Georgia before the Civil Rights Movement. Recounting treasured memories, Carter speaks candidly about black workers on the farm and the respect shown to them by his mother and father. In fact, some of Carter's fondest recollections surround his relationships with blacks and the marvelous lessons they unselfishly taught him about nature, farming, spirituality, and friendship. This is an inspirational story of a family pulling together during tough times while living with dignity and the resultant respect and goodness that propelled a young boy to become a kind and revered leader. B.J.P. © AudioFile 2001, Portland, Maine-- Copyright © AudioFile, Portland, Maine


From Booklist
Carter has written more than a dozen books since he left the White House; this vivid recollection of his Georgia childhood will probably be one of his most popular efforts. There are facts here--about the economics of farming during the Depression, the structure of sharecropping, and Georgia politics, for example--but the focus of Carter's narrative is the people who nurtured him on the farm and in Plains. Despite segregation, these people included African American neighbors as well as his own family, and Carter supplies lively portraits of many of the adults and children, black and white, who impressed him when he was little. Using a conversational tone, Carter wanders through the past, commenting on the weather and crop prices, local geography, chores and illnesses, adjusting to school, and learning to hunt and fish. Carter remains more popular as an ex-president than he was during his term of office, and his experiences are just different enough from those of most readers that his memoir should have broad appeal. Mary Carroll
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved


Review
Jonathan Yardley The Washington Post Book World A lovely and haunting piece of work...conveys with quiet passion...its author's love for the place in which he grew up and where, he says, he expects to rest for eternity.


Book Description
In an American story of enduring importance, Jimmy Carter re-creates his Depression-era boyhood on a Georgia farm, before the civil rights movement that changed it and the country. In what is sure to become a classic, the bestselling author of Living Faith and Sources of Strength writes about the powerful rhythms of countryside and community in a sharecropping economy. Along the way, he offers an unforgettable portrait of his father, a brilliant farmer and strict segregationist who treated black workers with his own brand of "separate" respect and fairness, and his strong-willed and well-read mother, a nurse who cared for all in need -- regardless of their position in the community. Carter describes the five other people who shaped his early life, only two of them white: his eccentric relatives who sometimes caused the boy to examine his heritage with dismay; the boyhood friends with whom he hunted with slingshots and boomerangs and worked the farm, but who could not attend the same school; and the eminent black bishop who refused to come to the Carters' back door but who would stand near his Cadillac in the front yard discussing crops and politics with Jimmy's father. Carter's clean and eloquent prose evokes a time when the cycles of life were predictable and simple and the rules were heartbreaking and complex. In his singular voice and with a novelist's gift for detail, Jimmy Carter creates a sensitive portrait of an era that shaped the nation. An Hour Before Daylight is destined to stand with other timeless works of American literature.


Download Description
Filled with the loving memories of his parents, childhood friends, and neighbors, An Hour Before Daylight is Jimmy Carter's beautiful and touching recollection of his Depression-era youth outside of the small town of Plains, Georgia -- a sweeping look at the South as it existed before the Civil Rights Movement changed the country forever. Blessed with a novelist's gift for detail, Carter describes the pressure of farming in very hard times, and most importantly, how a society of god-fearing men and women, who acted with individual kindness, could have been blind to the sin of discrimination until they were awakened by their fellow man. An Hour Before Daylight is ultimately a biography of the American South, written with stunning honesty by one of its most talented sons.


Book Info
An autobiography of Jimmy Carter's boyhood in Depression-era Georgia. Carter describes his family, this strict, segregationist society he lived in, his boyhood friends, most of whom were African-American, and the cycles of life in the rural community where he was raised. DLC: Carter, Jimmy--Childhood and youth.


About the Author
Jimmy Carter, who served as thirty-ninth president of the United States, was born in Plains, Georgia, in 1924. After leaving the White House, he and his wife, Rosalynn, founded the Atlanta-based Carter Center, a nonprofit organization that works to prevent and resolve conflicts, enhance freedom and democracy, and improve health around the world.

FROM OUR EDITORS

Jimmy Carter's single term as chief executive may not be viewed today as a terribly successful one, but he is among our hardest working and most respected former presidents, working tirelessly for the cause of human rights around the world and devoting great time and energy to the struggle to overcome homelessness here in the United States through his involvement with the organization Habitat for Humanity. In his new memoir, An Hour Before Daylight, Carter revisits his childhood in rural Georgia and considers the ways his youthful experiences have affected his adult life.

FROM THE PUBLISHER

In an American story of enduring importance, Jimmy Carter re-creates his Depression-era boyhood on a Georgia farm, before the civil rights movement that changed it and the country.

In what is sure to become a classic, the bestselling author of Living Faith and Sources of Strength writes about the powerful rhythms of countryside and community in a sharecropping economy. Along the way, he offers an unforgettable portrait of his father, a brilliant farmer and strict segregationist who treated black workers with his own brand of "separate" respect and fairness, and his strong-willed and well-read mother, a nurse who cared for all in need -- regardless of their position in the community.

Carter describes the five other people who shaped his early life, only two of them white: his eccentric relatives who sometimes caused the boy to examine his heritage with dismay; the boyhood friends with whom he hunted with slingshots and boomerangs and worked the farm, but who could not attend the same school; and the eminent black bishop who refused to come to the Carters' back door but who would stand near his Cadillac in the front yard discussing crops and politics with Jimmy's father.

Carter's clean and eloquent prose evokes a time when the cycles of life were predictable and simple and the rules were heartbreaking and complex. In his singular voice and with a novelist's gift for detail, Jimmy Carter creates a sensitive portrait of an era that shaped the nation.

An Hour Before Daylight is destined to stand with other timeless works of American literature.

SYNOPSIS

In his singular voice and with a novelist's gift for detail, Jimmy Carter creates a sensitive portrait of an era that shaped the nation.

FROM THE CRITICS

Roy Reed - New York Times Book Review

The nation should be grateful that he took up writing. He has the gift of language, and he has plenty to say. The new book is more than a memoir; it is also a carefully researched document of a time and place . . .

Book Magazine

Farm life is becoming increasingly unfamiliar. Most Americans know little to nothing about crop rotation, plowing fields, slaughtering hogs or clipping wing feathers of geese. And many, I imagine, don't feel like they're missing much by not knowing. The surprise of Jimmy Carter's new memoir, An Hour Before Daylight, is not that he knows so much about farming, but that his description of it is so engaging. In simple, precise language, Carter describes the many chores of daily farm existence, such as cotton mopping, a procedure to protect cotton from boll weevils and worms. "Beginning as a small child just able to carry a gallon bucket, I had a continuing job during the growing season of mixing arsenic, molasses and water in a large barrel and then helping to apply it by hand to the central buds of every cotton plant in Daddy's fields." Once past the initial shock of imagining children handling poison, you realize how radically different a farming childhood is from one lived in, say, the contemporary suburbs. The world Carter evokes is one literally lived close to the ground: "I preferred to plow without wearing shoes, and I remember vividly the caress of the soft, damp and cool freshly turned earth on my feet." It's almost unimaginable that a recent president of the largest, most powerful nation on earth, spent most of his childhood barefoot. Yet Carter's early existence just outside Plains, Georgia, probably had more in common with ancient worlds than millennial America. Carter writes, "Jesus and even Moses would have felt at home on a farm in the Deep South during the first third of the twentieth century." A strength of the memoir is that itisn't self-obsessed or self-aggrandizing. While many American memoirs imitate the Benjamin Franklin model of "How I became a self-made man and what I accomplished," Carter follows the Southern autobiographical tradition. Here emphasis falls on the community: the people, places and customs that shaped the individual. We learn much about Carter's parents, particularly his father, Earl; his relatives, like Uncle Buddy; and the black tenant farmers who lived nearby. Black-white relations, in fact, becomes a recurring theme of the memoir. Carter credits several blacks with profoundly affecting his life, though he does not always make it clear how they influenced him or what exactly they gave him. Carter also sprinkles in engaging anecdotes about his early years. We hear of how he approached baseball legends Frankie Frisch and Pepper Martin for an autograph, only for Martin to reply, "Get your ass off the field, boy!" We discover that he and his family used an outhouse and "wiped with old newspapers or pages torn from Sears, Roebuck catalogues." And we hear that Carter did "some enthusiastic petting" in the back seat of cars. An Hour Before Daylight, like Reynolds Price's classic memoir Clear Pictures, offers a rich, detailed portrait of a way of life that is mostly gone: a rural, small-town existence in which people lived outdoors, knew one another and didn't spend their evenings in front of television or a computer monitor. However, unlike Price's memoir, Carter's is too loosely organized and doesn't build toward specific revelations. While Carter is very good with detail and graceful with language, there is little analysis. Further, the memoir lacks tension and conflict; there are no painful episodes that might reveal his inner struggles. In spite of these flaws, however, the memoir remains useful—in part, because Carter succeeded so far beyond expectations. One can study his early life as if a blueprint for future achievement. After all, how could a farm boy from a family in which no one graduated from high school become president? While Carter offers no explicit answers, we see how his childhood shaped him into a confident, independent, thoughtful adult. Early responsibility surely enabled this. At age five, Carter sold boiled peanuts on the streets of Plains, and by sixteen he was measuring crop land for the Agricultural Adjustment Administration. While parents today fret about their children growing up too fast, children in Carter's community were plowing fields, handling poison, castrating pigs and hearing stories on the streets of Plains about the whorehouses in nearby Albany, Georgia. I can surely imagine people a hundred years from now reading Carter's memoir and marveling at the simplistic, rural childhood of this former president who lived in an age of nuclear weapons, space travel and Internet technology. An Hour Before Daylight is a thoguhtful, intelligent and eloquent book. —James Schiff

AudioFile

Not since Abraham Lincoln have Americans become as familiar with another humble U.S. President raised in the heart of farm country as they are with Jimmy Carter. Carter revisits his Depression-era childhood growing up in Georgia before the Civil Rights Movement. Recounting treasured memories, Carter speaks candidly about black workers on the farm and the respect shown to them by his mother and father. In fact, some of Carter's fondest recollections surround his relationships with blacks and the marvelous lessons they unselfishly taught him about nature, farming, spirituality, and friendship. This is an inspirational story of a family pulling together during tough times while living with dignity and the resultant respect and goodness that propelled a young boy to become a kind and revered leader. B.J.P. © AudioFile 2001, Portland, Maine

Marilyn Gardner - Christian Science Monitor