"At 4:33 P.M. on March 3, 1966, an F-5 tornado, the deadliest category, struck central Mississippi, killing fifty-seven people. Fourteen of those victims died in South Jackson, thirteen of them in a newly built shopping mall, the Candlestick Shopping Center. In minutes, what had been a row of neatly maintained shops was transformed into a scene of unimaginable devastation. Lives were changed forever.

A World Turned Over recounts what happened on the day of the Candlestick Tornado, as it came to be known in Jackson, and how its aftermath still reverberates today.".

"Returning to the neighborhood where she grew up, Lorian Hemingway remembers the Jackson that she knew: a Southern town defined as much by its warm creeks and catfish ponds and the smell of clay in the air as by its inhabitants - families with a deep sense of place and of community. When the tornado struck, it destroyed more than buildings and it reached beyond the deaths it caused.

For those people who, like Hemingway, grew up there, Jackson changed in an instant from a safe and familiar place into an alien landscape of death and destruction." "Hemingway re-creates the day of the tornado, drawing on both news stories and interviews with survivors."--BOOK JACKET.