Bluff City:

Lauterbach’s riveting recounting of the sanitation strike, and the stranger-than-fiction role Withers may have played in the riot that threw it into chaos, would be enough to make Bluff City an indispensable work.

Steve Nathans-Kelly, New York Journal of Books

Meticulous and engrossing.

Anjali Enjeti, Atlanta Journal-Constitution

Lauterbach’s vibrant study of Withers, a black photographer in Memphis who documented the civil rights era while also serving as an informant for the F.B.I., doubles as a love letter to Withers’s hometown.

Editors' Choice, New York Times Book Review

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.

Ed Ward, Financial Times

[Preston] Lauterbach… provides a better feel for life in Memphis… [and] a thoughtful analysis of Withers’s talent as a photographer.

Clifford Thompson, Wall Street Journal

Bluff City does a masterful job of telling the story of civil rights in Memphis in the 1960s. ... [A] great narrative.

Ed Ward, author of The History of Rock & Roll, Vol 1: 1920-1963, Financial Times

A story vividly told.

Alice Speri, The Intercept

Lauterbach ... provides a better feel for life in Memphis ... [and] a ... thoughtful analysis of Withers’s talent as a photographer.

Clifford Thompson, Whiting Award-winner and author of Twin of Blackness, Wall Street Journal

A loose, rangy history of the civil rights movement in Memphis, using Withers and his camera as the (literal) lens. [Lauterbach’s] done the work, tracking the complex, intertwined dances of the radicals and the centrists, the local ministers and visiting heavyweights like King.

Christopher Bonanos, New York Times Book Review

Meticulous and engrossing.

Atlantic Journal-Constitution

Through intimate reporting and effortless storytelling, Bluff City captures both the tragic ironies of FBI espionage and the fertile contradictions of Memphis, Tennessee. The photographs of Ernest Withers—spy, artist, race man, and cagey black conservative—have never looked more meaningful.

William J. Maxwell, author of F.B. Eyes: How J. Edgar Hoover’s Ghostreaders Framed African American Literature

Through intimate reporting and effortless storytelling, Bluff City captures both the tragic ironies of FBI espionage and the fertile contradictions of Memphis, Tennessee. The photographs of Ernest Withers—spy, artist, race man, and cagey black conservative—have never looked more meaningful.

William J. Maxwell, author of F.B. Eyes: How J. Edgar Hoover’s Ghostreaders Framed African American Literature and editor of James Baldwin: The FBI File

Lauterbach provides a fresh, balanced, and provocative exploration of the photographer’s life and controversial choices.

Booklist

[A] fantastic story.

Publishers Weekly