Freedom Fighters and Hell Raisers
A Gallery of Memorable Southerners
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- $16.99
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- $16.99
Publisher Description
"I don't have any children, so I've decided to claim all the future freedom-fighters and hell-raisers as my kin," wrote journalist Molly Ivins. Ivins is one of the biggest hell-raisers profiled in this collection of essays by Hal Crowther, but there is plenty hell-raising and freedom-fighting to go around. Crowther is a writer whose own career is marked by sharp political and social commentary in the pages of national and regional outlets, from Time to the Atlanta Constitution to The Oxford American. In this collection, he turns his attention to best and the brightest of the recently departed generation in the South. These essays commemorate the passing of iconic Southern figures such as John Hope Franklin, Doc Watson, Judy Bonds, and James Dickey. Crowther has known most of the folks he profiles and has lived in their particular landscape for decades; he has some stories to tell, and he does so with a particular appreciation for his subjects’ accomplishments, their surroundings, and even, in the case of politicos Jesse Helms and George Wallace, their particular brand of notoriousness. Novelist and commentator Silas House, author of Southernmost and A Parchment of Leaves, introduces the collection.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Journalist Crowther (Cathedrals of Kudzu) reveals his characteristic razor-sharp wit and forthrightness in this group of profiles, most previously published, of fellow Southerners, including politicians, writers, preachers, and musicians. Crowther celebrates (for the most part) their lives, beginning with Molly Ivins, a journalist whose likes, he posits, will never be seen again for with her indiscreet and "exuberantly scathing" attitude and writing, she "dispensed home truths your mother never suspected in language your mother never used." Crowther doesn't come only to praise, holding nothing back in his criticism of former North Carolina senator Jesse Helms, likened to a "huge old pit bull, useless and vicious, that sits in its own mess at the end of a tow-truck chain and snarls at everything that moves." The preacher and civil rights activist Will Campbell, meanwhile, was "a Dixie Diogenes navigating by his own light, searching for honesty and virtue in a troubled land." Poet James Dickey, according to Crowther, was an unruly, unreliable, impossible man who nevertheless produced some beloved poetry. The book also covers, among others, John Hope Franklin, George Wallace, Doc Watson, and Jesse Winchester. Crowther's inimitable voice either soothes like bourbon or burns like whisky throughout this clear-eyed collection.
