The stories are short and easy reads, so stick this book on your bedside table and read a story or two each night before going to sleep.
The only fault I had with "Southern Fried Plus 6" is that many of the settings and characters had a sameness to them. But this is a minor problem in what is overall a fine collection.
So I am delighted to see it back in print (with six new additions) and heartily recommend it. This is a particularly good book to have if you're reading in bits - coffee breaks and the like - because the stories are very short. (Some aren't even stories so much as little vignettes.) Be warned, though, your co-workers may look strangely at you when you burst into uncontrollable guffaws.
I can't think of any close comparisons - maybe Jeff Foxworthy on some sort of very dangerous drugs? Anyway buy this and read it. If it doesn't make you laugh you must have had your sense of humor shot off.
List price: $18.95 (that's 30% off!)
It is also the reason I must be kind in this review. These books remind you that you read books like this for two reasons. One is to participate vicariously in an intense experience. The second is to further our understanding of science--both social and physical. How does a disaster develop? How do we react to it? Were the right decisions made? This book, written before the others I mentioned, does not fufill any of these purposes very well.
"Lunatic Wind" is essentially a first-person account of the passage of Hurricane Hugo through South Carolina and how it affected a man, his two teen-aged sons and their grandmother. The account is very parochial and not very insightful.
Perhaps the most memorable passages are the descriptions of the two young men, doggedly ignoring and resourcefully dodging all attempts to keep them from surfing in a hurricane off a barrier island. If anything proves the late development of judgement skills in the adolescent this is it!
One hungers for comprehensive journalistic accounts of important disaster events like Hurricanes Hugo and Andrew: "How did the storms develop?" "Were they predicted accurately?" "How did people (and institutions) survive?" "What was the long-term impact?" But they are apparently rarely attempted. Which makes books like "Lunatic Wind" valuable.
"Lunatic Wind," should be seen as a primary source, a building block, to an eagerly anticipated comprehensive treatment of Hurricane Hugo.
List price: $24.95 (that's 30% off!)
Diary" and "Dear Diary: Wanda" which were published as part of "Southern Fried Plus Six" in the late Sixties. If you've read those, you've seen pretty much everything in "Wild Blue Yonder." A high school dropout enlists in the Air Corps and various things happen pretty much the same way they did in the earlier stories - training, a bar fight in Texas, the girls he and his buddies meet in town and their night out, he's just adding to old stuff that he's said before. A couple of examples:
From "Dear Diary":
"Had lunch. Good food. Had two helpings of everything. Nice cut of ham with raisin sauce. Potatoes, beans, ice cream and coffee."
From "Wild Blue Yonder":
"Same day 1830 hours. Great food for supper. Nice cut of ham with raisen sauce. Raisen e or i? ...Had two helpings of everything. Except ice cream."
Now, I have been a Fox fan for quite awhile, long enough to have had a copy of "Southern Fried" since the Seventies and to remember big chunks of it, but I have to say I was thoroughly
disappointed with "Wild Blue." I bought it at the Southern Festival of Books, a big literary gathering that happens in Nashville every fall, and meant to go hear Fox speak at one of the authors' forums and maybe even get him to sign this, but I managed to miss his appearance and it's probably just as well. It's actually quite a good story if you haven't read those two from "Southern Fried," but if you have you can see everything coming before Fox says it and the book's not nearly as interesting.
List price: $19.95 (that's 20% off!)