I was born, raised and educated through college in Alabama, and I was riveted by Hal Crowther's account of life and culture in the South. I couldn't put it down; my husband kept asking why I was laughing out loud. It covers the gamut of everything Southern--from race relations to dogs to barbeque to Elvis. Crowther is a sympathetic writer, but pulls no punches and is not (in my view) the least bit revisionist about the South's mottled history. You'll enjoy the book more if you've paid homage at the altar of Southern literature--Eudora Welty, William Faulkner, Walker Percy. I would recommend it especially to any Southern ex-pats. Fire up your grill, make some iced tea (or pour yourself a bourbon if you're so inclined), put an Elvis CD on the stereo, and kick back.

This book is really worth your time. Hal Crowther is funny and serious and highly original, even with the South's easy targets, like Elvis or the Southern Belle. Even when Hal Crowther is highly critical, he really gets at the essence of why regionalism is relevant, especially when he's writing about about literature and religion.

Hal Crowtther, a child of the '60s generation, sees our world through a slightly cynical prism. There certainly have been depressing events over the last 38 years, but Crowther's liberal bias makes him less the objective observer and more of a crank. The book is well written, mostly a review of newspaper columns he wrote over the years. The publisher compares him to Mencken, one of my favorites, but where Mencken pricked all balloons, Crowther pricks only conservative balloons, and a few of them justly so. He comes close to Molly Ivins' style but lacks her knife point humor. I enjoyed the book, but I hoped for somewhat better than I found. 3 stars is adequate.

This is a collection of journalistic essays from Hal Crowther, also known as Lee Smith's husband. The guy is a very stylish writer who pulls no punches, and although philosophically liberal, Crowther is quite capable of pissing people off at all points of the political spectrum. His subjects are varied enough to maintain the reader's interest through 300 plus pages and although Crowther comes off as a bit of a curmudgeon, he is able to express sympathy when it is deverved.