South Toward Home
Adventures and Misadventures in My Native Land
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- 10,99 €
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- 10,99 €
Descrizione dell’editore
In considering the pleasures and absurdities of her native culture, Julia Reed quotes another Southern writer, Willie Morris, who said, “It’s the juxtapositions that get you down here.” These juxtapositions are, for Julia, the soul of the South, and in her warmhearted and funny new book, South Toward Home, she chronicles her adventures through the highs and the lows of Southern life—taking us everywhere from dive bars and the Delta Hot Tamale Festival to an impromptu shindig on a Mississippi River sandbar and a coveted seat on a Mardi Gras float. She writes about the region’s music and food, its pesky critters and prodigious drinking habits, its inhabitants’ penchant for making their own fun—and, crucially, their gift for laughing at themselves.
With her distinctive voice and knowing eye, Julia also provides her take on the South’s more embarrassing characteristics from the politics of lust and the persistence of dry counties to the “seemingly bottomless propensity for committing a whole lot of craziness in the name of the Lord.” No matter what, she writes, “My fellow Southerners have brought me the greatest joy—on the page, over the airwaves, around the dinner table, at the bar or, hell, in the checkout line.” South Toward Home, with a foreword by Jon Meacham, is Julia Reed’s valentine to the place she knows and loves best.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Reed's collection of snappy columns from the Southern lifestyle magazine Garden & Gun makes for an inviting way to ease into summer reading, even for those who have never ventured below the Mason-Dixon line. She describes growing up in a rarified South, one that included impressive guests at family parties William F. Buckley, for one and debutante balls, but her writing transcends socioeconomic boundaries as easily as geographic ones. A top-notch storyteller, Reed relates early memories ranging from a case of adolescent heartbreak that resulted in her triumphant discovery of "the healing power of glamour," to the complete neglect of her beloved first car. A Southern book would be incomplete without a discussion of food, and Reed does not disappoint, with nods to fried chicken, Kool-Aid pickles (aka the Koolickle), various pig parts, and the Delta tamale. Most memorable, perhaps, are Reed's stories about entertaining, from "insanely over the top" boat rides on the Mississippi to a raucous Thanksgiving celebration pairing turkey with mint juleps. Reed is hilarious and charmingly irreverent, and her ability to capture an element of Southern life in a phrase ("God, Gators and Gumbo" for Louisiana) or to describe, in a short sentence or two, a funny, sweet memory of 40 years ago, are the marks of a true talent.
