KC Star Review Comments About "King of Kings County," by Whitney Terrell

The following are descriptions of the book taken from KC Star’s review: 

• “The result is a 361-page novel that succeeds not only as an excellent yarn about a father and son but also as a story of how cities develop.
• Terrell's narrator is Jack Acheson. It is the 1950s in Kansas City, and Jack's father, Alton, is a rather crude but savvy fellow who's about to make big bucks. He may not be the best-mannered man in the world, but he knows that the coming of Interstate 35 to the city offers him the chance to clean up in the real-estate market.
• But Alton Acheson's methods are a bit shady. He hoodwinks farmers out of land in Kings County (Johnson County to you and me), buying up parcels along the highway corridor that will be worth a great deal.
• More disturbingly, he elicits help from the African-American community to get a kind of domino effect rolling: With the help of a black real estate agent, he starts moving people of color into white neighborhoods, provoking white flight into new neighborhoods - an approach that gets home sales churning but also makes a segregated city even more divided.
• Though the figures are fiction, Terrell says, the story is real. The author did a great deal of research about the Kansas City area in the 1950s and found some disquieting, coalescing forces.  The city's trolley system faded as the interstates encroached. Meanwhile, the courts were ordering schools desegregated. Whites began fleeing the urban core, abetted by the new thoroughfares that made getting back and forth - between jobs and the new suburbs - easy.
• Terrell allows that the book's themes may make some people a little uncomfortable - which, by the way, is one of the functions of fiction, after all.
• Terrell does balk when asked whether certain characters in the novel are based on real Kansas Citians.
• "It's up to readers to draw those parallels. I'm not willing to say. If I'd wanted to do that, I would've written a nonfiction book.
• "But this wasn't accidental," he adds. "These things occurred for reasons, and I think it's important to be honest about why and how they occurred.”

Link to Clif Hostetler's Review of King of King's County