Because I know very little about the history of the city in which I live, I took a break from my traditional late-August lit-theory cram to read Osha Gray Davidson's The Best of Enemies, the book that's being assigned to all Duke freshpersons this year. I'm very glad they're reading this book—it definitely should essential reading for anyone arriving in Durham from other places. Davidson begins with a general history of Durham, especially the history of its African-American citizenry, before segueing into a history of the civil rights movement in North Carolina—but the focus is always on the antagonism and eventual strange friendship between Durhamite housing rights advocate Ann Atwater, a 390-pound African-American single mother, and C.P. Ellis, former Exalted Cyclops of the local Klu Klux Klan. It is on Ellis that the book hangs the weight of its subtitle, Race and Redemption in the New South, and the book fulfills that promise in what seemed to me to be the best and worst thematic senses—both the ecstatic possibility of redemption and redemption's sad limits. Through it all Davidson exposes the ways in which class considerations undergird racial assumptions, and in particular the way in which racial conflict has always served as a sort of heatsink for class resentment in America. And it's a great story. Check it out.