This boook includes, well, a thousand interesting facts about the South. Being Southern myself, I never knew what was in a mint julep (along with 90% of the rest of the South). This is a book that you can pick up, flip to any page and just read. Everything is interesting, and you might learn something, too. Recommended!

Slowing down along all those back roads of the world that is the South is the only way to appreciate the unique outlook of the southern spirit where life and events are often taken with a grain of salt due to the fact that the important things were the same yesterday, and the day before, and all the days before that. Emotional health is probably the most valued commodity, and perhaps the most scrutinized quality of southern communities. In many cases, it is the most important development to watch and gauge since much of the south is far from the pyramids of power that are often created in locations like New York, Washington, D.C., Chicago or Los Angeles. It is eons away from foreign influences of Paris, London, Asia or Japan. The living is easy and the sun is hot requiring local dynamics to be the most valuable in terms of acceptance. It gives a new meaning to the idea of majority and minority but not necessarily confined to color. To know the south, time spent there is a must. Southerners appreciate the meaning of home grown and honor their own perspective on life, which sometimes isn't the same as it is in other parts of the country. Rebel yells have a different meaning than up north and don't always reflect the civil war years. It helps to understand Hank Williams, Jr. and some of the other country singers who have it in their blood. 1,0001 facts about the south can only help people appreciate this unique part of the country where life is meant to be savored, not swift. It is greatly aided by a partner of commensurable sentiments.

Born in Texas of Texan parents, but raised outside the South (except for six years or so in the Virginia suburbs of Washington, DC, which aren't nearly as Southern as they used to be), I've always felt self-consciously removed from what I'd like to consider my heritage. Thanks to John Shelton Reed and Dale Volberg Reed's great book, I've not only discovered I'm more Southern than I realized, but know a lot more about that section of the country than I did before.

'1001 Things Everyone Should Know about the South' is a book anyone can open at random and start reading anywhere. But if you read it straight through, systematically, I'm willing to guarantee almost anyone they'll discover things about the South they never knew before.

This book is not a fancied-up version of 'You Know You're a Redneck When ...'.

The Reeds are serious researchers and writers, and they look at the South through the lenses of history, geography, ethnology, linguistics, religion, art, music, literature, architecture, cooking, politics, economics, and more. There are the obligatory sections on the Confederacy and the War, of course, but the Reeds understand, as other historians and writers have also noted, that the CSA was a period of barely five years out of more than 400 years of Southern history. (One of the things everyone should know about the South is that there were European settlers in Virginia, Texas, and Florida before anyone save Native Americans had set foot on Plymouth Rock.) This is one of the things that made '1001 Things ...' a far more satisfying book for me than was Michael Andrew Grissom's 'Southern by the Grace of God,' which had a tendency to view everything through the prism of the War.

There is an enormous amount of interesting material in this book, ranging from the difference between 'Cajun' and 'Creole,' to the differences in habits between Southerners and folks in other parts of the nation (northerners subscribe to more dog magazines but Southerners own more dogs), to regional differences in linguistics and cuisine (finally I've found someplace that explains regional varieties of barbecue, though as a loyal son of Texas I have to agree that brisket, not pork, is the proper barbecuing meat [#647]).

Among the other interesting things I learned: 80 percent of Southern parents teach their children to say 'sir' and 'ma'am' to adults (mine sure did), whereas only 46 percent of non-Southern parents do [#148]; 80 percent of Southerners also admit to using 'you-all' or 'y'all' occasionally as the second person plural, whereas most non-Southerners almost never do [#147]; one of the characteristics of Southern writers is that many of them only discovered their 'Southernness' when they lived outside the South [#472 -- hey! Like me!], and that Southern artists, or at least artists from the South, include Jasper Johns, Charles Willson Peale and Rembrandt Peale, John James Audubon, and Robert Rauschenberg, among many others.

My favorite living writer, Florence King (author of 'Confessions of a Failed Southern Lady,' among much else), said of this book, 'Every page is a treat!' As usual, I agree with her absolutely.

Mr. Reed sure can write. I don't always agree with him; to turn around what he says about Steve Earle Reed's politics are suspect. And more importantly how can he believe that Randy Travis is better than Earle and Dwight Yoakam? Still even when I didn't agree I enjoyed it. The essays on country music and Ted Kennedy are worth the price of the book by themselves. Best of all it's wonderful to see someone defending my home region who isn't a confederate flag waving ....

I've long been a fan of John Shelton Reed's "Letter from the Lower Right" in Chronicles magazine, and gave very high marks to "1,001 Things Everyone Should Know About the South," which he wrote with his wife. But for some reason, I had never made an effort to track down and read any of the collections of his essays. I see now what a mistake that was. I wish I'd read this back when it was new.

It was some consolation to find that the articles and essays here assembled were definitely worth the wait. Reed is a very funny writer, but he's not a "humorist" or humor writer in the sense of, say, Dave Barry or even (to move outside the region) P.J. O'Rourke. You'll definitely get a laugh out of many of these pieces, but you'll also find them deeply informative. Reed is, after all, a serious researcher and thinker, and the two indisputable facts that define his writing -- that he loves the South, and he *knows* the South -- feed off one another.

Granted, many of the essays here are more than a little dated (some date back to the Carter Administration), and I'd love to know how things have changed in the thirteen, fifteen, or almost twenty-five years since some of them were written. But that's no doubt just one more reason to track down Reed's more recent collections.

Southerners, including expatriates, will nod knowingly at much of what Reed says, and will get a kick out of seeing themselves depicted so accurately in print. I hope they'll also take to heart his commitment to preserving many of the things -- from culture to accent -- that make the South truly distinctive. Folks from other parts of the country will find that Reed has not only made that sometimes-puzzling region a little easier to understand, but has made the trip a remarkably pleasant one.

This book cannot be recommended too highly to anyone with the slightest interest in the South. It is, in every sense, a delight to read and will easily withstand repeated readings.

This is the third of John Shelton Reed's books that I have read and its style sits somewhere between that of "1001 Things Everyone Should Know About the South" and "My Tears Spoiled My Aim". The book comprises a collection of dispatches culled from Reed's contributions to newspapers, journals and magazines between 1979-1990. Most of these are 1,000-1,500 words long. The book begins with observations on two of his favorite themes, Southern identity and the New South, before moving on to Southern culture, food, politics and religion. Reed is a favorably prejudiced but acute observer of Southern manners, quirks, oddities and behaviour.

The dispatches are written to entertain and don't disappoint. I found plenty at which to laugh out loud. However, this is not to say that Reed is not surreptitiously engaged in a secret mission to raise his readers' awareness of the character and virtues of things Southern. There's plenty enough here even to make a Yankee laugh - especially some of his more elliptical humor. I particularly liked his comment on Ted Kennedy: "For my part, I rather like the fellow. He's certainly the closest thing to a good old boy that Massachussetts will ever produce - which isn't to say that he ought to be president, merely that I think he'd make a pretty good drinking buddy as long as somebody else did the driving."

Reed is exceptionally good at capturing the spirit or the essence of something and making it seem familiar to you. I have never visited Bob Jones University but, in just over three pages, Reed made me feel I knew what kind of place it was. He does the same for a number of Southern characters and institutions.

Reed is a gifted cultural interpreter who appraches his topics with respect, affection and good humor. It's tempting to say that Reed is a popularizer but that belies his considerable writing talents. Whilst everything is written in an engaging style, Reed makes few concessions to his readership - he delights in his use of language and deploys an extensive vocabularly that would make some of my students reach for their dictionaries.

All in all this book is an unqualified delight. Go buy it now - you won't be disappointed.

I am from Brooklyn, New York and spent four years in a rural Virginia town. I was informed I was the third Jew to have lived in the town. Too bad, this book didn't exist when I lived down there. I just read it and couldn't put the book down and stop laughing. I learned about Professor Reed from the book Culture Shock USA, The South. An invaluble book for those who want to do business with Southerners, or move down there and become "Damn Yankees" (as my Alabama cousins call them). (You know you are liked, when you are promoted to Damn Yankee). To the reviewer from Birmingham, England. Explore the South and enjoy!

A Brit like me needs all the help he can get when it comes to understanding the South - and John Shelton Reed is the man to supply it. Readers may find the review from a reader in Vermont a little misleading - this book is not written for laughs although it is often very amusing. Reed is no Bill Bryson - but neither is Bryson a John Shelton Reed.

The book is a wonderful collection of short esssays that illuminate and explain "Southern-ness". Pinning down Southern characteristics - or indeed even where "The South" begins and ends - is like trying to nail Jell-O to a wall. However, that does not prevent Reed making the attempt with humor and considerable scholarship.

Most of the chapters have previously appeared in journals or are based on such papers. Reed's tone is light and entertaining even though the underlying purpose is serious. Perhaps the most overtly scholarly is the opening chapter that deals with the geographical extent of "The South". It is well adorned with plates taken from a very wide range of academic journals showing the incidence in the contiguous states of various factors suspected of reflecting Southern-ness. All the usual suspects are here: self-perception, cotton cultivation, incidence of lynchings, members of Baptist chruches, and 'Southern Living' readers. However, Reed has other less familiar indicators of Southern-ness such as where kudzu grows, ratio of active dentists to population, states mentioned in country-music lyrics, ratio of homicides to suicides, or chapters of the Kappa Alpha order.

It makes for fascinating reading and a shifting pattern of where the South is. Other chapters deal with such disparate issues as the depiction of Southern women in Playboy magazine, violence in country music, the Southern diaspora, and life and leisure in the New South. Reed's real achievement is to disguise his scholarship as an entertaining and informative read.

This is a very different kind of book from Reed's 1001 Things Everyone Should Know About the South. That was more an eclectic collection of facts, both familiar and unfamiliar, grouped loosely around broad themes. It was more for dipping into than reading straight through. The present book is more limited in its aims and obliquely explores a few specific questions in greater depth.

All in all, this is an immesely enjoyable book that is full of surprising revelations about the nature of Southern-ness. Some of the material on which it is based is getting a little dated (the bulk of sources are from the 1970s and early 1980s) and we can only hope that Reed is moved to bring out a new edition.

John Shelton Reed does it again in this hilarious book. I have finally become addicted to his writing which is some of the most accurate and funny I have seen in quite some time, since I have been in academia for most of my life now. Anyone living in the South or those who have left and remember it well (like myself) will love this gem of a book.

John Shelton Reed's ability to write with humor and seriousness at the same time never ceases to amaze me. He gets his usually penetrating point across with such concise facility. This book is a just a collection of impressions about the South written from a Southerner's point of view. It's not intended as an academic treatise, but I've read other works by Reed which shows him to be a brilliant academic, so it's nice to know that these aren't just the ramblings of some ill-informed and provincial person. He's seen the world, and frankly prefers the South to any of it. Really, I have to agree with him whole-heartedly in this vein!

The South and its people have been subject to more than a double ration of misinformation and stereotypes despite the insistence or even obsession of southerners to tell about the South. A suitable corrective for these oversimplifications comes in the writings of John Shelton Reed. Reed, a University of North Carolina sociologist, manages an accurate, sympathetic, and amusing characterization of important southern "types." There's something for everyone here. This book, together with Florence King's SOUTHERN LADIES AND GENTLEMEN and some of Lewis Grizzard's works, gives a good introduction to Southern types. Of course a a warning is necessary: while Southerners, as Roy Blount, Jr. observed, like to act typical, they also take a sheer delight in being unpredictable just for the holy hell of it.

Reed knows his types: the Good Ole Boy, the Aristocrat, etc. These people the southern landscape and provide entertainment for each other. These are people who are apt to equate loving the Lord and SEC football, and favor Coke to Pepsi.

I suppose one could quibble about some types that he omitted, but this is a short and enjoyable book and well-worth the reading. Hell fire, podners: Professor John Shelton Reed is a wonderous writer who will bring you to a smile like good barbecue.

This is clearly an examination done by a sociologist. His previous works demonstrate what the reader ought to anticipate. He has done useful research in bringing PH pamphlets to light, but reinterprets the Ritual movement in terms of something akin to the 1960's protest movement of counter culture. It might provide some soclological insight to 'some' followers of ritualism but it says nothing about the heart, mind, soul, and theology of the leaders. It falls far short of giving an apologetic, history, and theology to ritualism

High church? Evangelical? Broad church? As a relatively recent (4 years) member of the Reformed Episcopal Church, these terms have been a matter of both great interest and great confusion to me. Reed's book is a terrific history of the Anglo-Catholic movement in England, but touches many other bases along the way. His prose is lucid, his style humerous. This book was difficult to put down except during periods of helpless laughter. It should be of use to any Anglican wishing to become better informed about the history and development of our "via media."