Lee statue on August 12 with Eli Mosley and Thomas Rousseau in foreground (Eze Amos)
The Nation 
June 2, 2026
Deborah Baker’s Charlottesville: An American Story is history of the city and how its checkered past ultimately led to the Unite the Right rally.
“Like the Democratic officials in Charlottesville who repeatedly ignored the threat from violent right-wing reactionaries, the Democratic Party establishment is proving itself to be just as ineffective. […] Liberals and centrists, from 2017 till now, from Charlottesville’s local government to the upper echelons of the Democratic Party, have stumbled and fallen over their commitments to moderation—misapprehending the threat of authoritarianism and enabling its growing strength. And because of liberalism’s failures, Charlottesville has come to the Oval Office.”
Jose Sanchez
Los Angeles Review of Books
November 4, 2025
Baker clearly sees her book as a definitive account, and so provides an exhaustive, kaleidoscopic detailing of it all. We get an almost minute by minute multiperspectival account, starting with the foggy, humid early morning gathering and march led by clergy and counterprotesters, followed by the clashes around Emancipation Park that began a few hours later and seemed to go on forever while police stood by. We later witness the horrifying car attack on the counterprotesters who were marching down a narrow Downtown side street two hours after officials had finally declared an unlawful assembly, scattering angry UTR participants throughout the Downtown area.
Aniko Bodroghkozy
The Southern Review of Books
August 13, 2025
“Charlottesville” is an American Story that Refuses to Let Hate Win
“Perhaps I should admit now that I don’t know how to write this review. Perhaps I should explain that Deborah Baker’s Charlottesville: An American Story is brilliant, heartbreaking, and incredibly well-researched. Perhaps I should tell you just how much I didn’t know about the events of August 2017, the compounding tragedies that came to be known simply as “Charlottesville.” Perhaps I should urge you to discover – as I did – the way Charlottesville’s history informed those events, the way Charlottesville’s past illuminates our future.”
Sara Beth West
New York Times Book Review
June 8, 2025
“How a Hate Crime in a Southern City Foretold the Rise of the Far Right”
“Baker’s vividly detailed reconstruction is a worthwhile addition to a growing canon of narrative nonfiction aimed at documenting and interpreting the outburst of race- and hate-driven violence in America between 2015 (the massacre at Emanuel A.M.E. Church in Charleston, S.C.) and 2020 (the killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis).”
Kevin Sack
The New Republic
June 12, 2025
“Unearthing the Deep Fascist Roots of the Unite the Right Rally”
“The biographer and essayist Deborah Baker’s Charlottesville: An American Story is both an account of those two horrifying days and an intellectual history of the far right in the United States. It mixes investigative rigor—Baker must have listened to hundreds, if not thousands, of hours of archived Charlottesville City Council meetings, as well as far-right podcasts and YouTube videos—with emotional intensity and wide-ranging cultural critique. […] Charlottesville is not a book of the here and now. It’s too wide-ranging for that. In all its movement through time, through archives and forums and the intellectual history of America’s ugliest movements, it seeks to locate “the germ of the present in the past”—a mission of which Baker declares herself skeptical; maybe, she writes, it’s ‘just something writers tell themselves to exert control over events that are effectively beyond their control. But it was what I knew.'”
Lily Meyer
Advance Reviews
Booklist
May 1, 2025 (starred)
“This stark account of the 2017 white supremacist “Unite the Right” rally seeks perspective but cannot shake deep feelings of dread. Baker (The Last Englishmen, 2018), who began her writing career as a literary biographer, animates her retelling of the infamous torch march and the violence that followed with the personal trajectories of key people involved.”
Publisher’s Weekly (starred)
April 15, 2025
“In this captivating account, Pulitzer finalist Baker (The Last Englishmen) brings a historian’s insight to bear on a minute-by-minute report of the August 2017 Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Va., when white supremacists rioted against a city council vote to relocate a statue of Robert E. Lee.”
Kirkus Reviews
February 15, 2025
“Populating her account with the likes of violence-bent if often inept men whom she dubs Swastika Pin, Tampa Realtor, Red Shirt, and the like—their real identities later exposed through careful investigation—Baker demonstrates the despicable falsity of Donald Trump’s saying that there “were very fine people, on both sides”—and shows how coordinated resistance against white supremacists both can work and will be required again in the coming years.”
A vivid account that capably illuminates the evils half-hidden under a flickering torch.