Scouring law-enforcement reports, archives, memoirs, personal papers and adding her own interviews, McWhorter, in her first book, expertly follows the tangled threads of culpability until they reveal what she calls ''the long tradition of enmeshment between law enforcers and Klansmen,'' which included the Federal Bureau of Investigation as well as the state and city police. There are few innocents in her depiction, especially on the white side, where the roots of bigotry and murder insinuate themselves into the foundation of the city's ''rule of law'' and the bedrock of its corporate power.

''Carry Me Home'' is an exhaustive journey through both the segregationist and integrationist sides of Birmingham's struggle. To unravel that personal story, she had to unravel the entire story. In her adulthood outside her native city, however, she suffered a delayed reaction: a longer, gnawing anxiety about her family's possible connections with the violent resistance to integration. In her childhood world of white Birmingham, the bombing's immediate consequence was trivial: a spasm of anxiety and the cancellation of a rehearsal for ''The Music Man,'' in which she had a part. ''But I was growing up on the wrong side of the revolution,'' she writes. 15, 1963, she was about the same age as the four black girls who were killed by the bomb at the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Ala. This happened either in real time or later, in a kind of retrospective anguish that has produced fine scholarship, fiction and journalism and even enlightened politics. Lacking the detachment that allowed most Northerners to make judgments without making commitments, Southern whites who valued justice were forced to confront themselves, their families, their place of privilege. THERE are few white people in America more passionately perceptive about our vexing national problem of race than liberal-minded whites from the South, especially those who lived through the turbulent years of the civil rights movement. Birmingham, Alabama: The Climactic Battle of the Civil Rights Revolution.

Carry Me Home by Diane McWhorter