I collect true inspirational stories. One of the disadvantages of shopping "on-line" is you don't always know what you are getting. That was the case with "Southern Christmas: Literary Classics of the Holidays." If you are looking for mostly Southern flavored fiction by Southern autors with a heavy dose of narratives about racial prejudice against blacks,this is for you. Especially nice non-fiction pieces come from Robert E. Lee and Harper Lee punctuate the volume. One page bios of the authors are helpful and interesting. If you want something more traditional and inspirational, save your money.

At last a collection which reveals the many faces of Christmas in the South. Too many anthologies about Christmas show only the sweet and often unrealistic side of Christmas. For those who have both laughed at absurdities and cried at frustrations on this day, this anthology is for you. Twenty-eight of the finest Southern writers allow us entry into their Christmas experinces. Buy this book, you will not be sorry. Contributors inlcude Rick Bragg, Robert E. Lee, Dori Sanders, and Harper Lee.

I saw this book around at bookstores last year but never picked it up until I saw a mention of it recently and decided to order a copy. It is a very nice mix of Christmas stories by Southern authors--most predictible and a few I'd never heard of and was intrigued to discover. My favorite was Lillian Smith's recollection of the chain gang coming over for Christmas dinner. Some authors I'd hoped for are missing, but generally I really enjoyed it and recommend it to others as the holidays draw near.

What would you do if you had the resources to buy anyone or anything you wished? Guy Grand acts immediately and directly on this premise, and the results are, on the surface hilarious. But it is Southern's quiet, subtle, and expertly woven satirical narrative and incisive comment on 1950s America amid the vignettes of money-fueled chaos that are the true gems, and the heart of this wonderful novel. The best example of this is the book's final lines, where Southern closes gently yet pointedly with a description of "the strange searching haste which can be seen in the faces, and especially the eyes, of (American) people in the (American) cities, every evening, just about the time now it starts really getting dark" (parenthesis added).

A comment of this book is not complete without a nod to the 1969 movie. Believing that most readers of this book will come to it by way of the film, I think there may be some disappointment. This is no massive epic (the novel is only 148 pages) that had to be pared down for screenplay treatment, so there's just not that much more to enjoy. Most of the sketches from the movie are directly out of the book, the only real change being the story's placement in late 1960s mod Britain, not 1950s Eisenhower-Middle America. This change of venue works very, very well for the film, with its English cast and contributors, including lead Peter Sellers, hippie Beatle Ringo Starr, Monty Python studs John Cleese and Graham Chapman, and ubiquitous party-boy Who drummer, Keith Moon as an addled nun. The only thing missing from the film is the novel's quiet satire.

In literary history, "The Magic Christian" will be remembered as the book which got Terry Southern the job of writing "Dr Strangelove": it seems that Peter Sellers loved the book and sent out 100 copies to his friends, one of whom was the great Stanley Kubrick. The book, indeed, is a side-splitting satire, following one Guy Grand (a "grand guy"), a millionaire of uncertain origin, as he pays for exorbitant pranks with the sole purpose of "making it hot" for people. ("How much would it cost me to make you eat that ticket?" Grand asks an astonished traffic cop.) But the book is far from silly: like much of Southern's work, the comedy barely masks strong critiques of greed and elitism. It is a must-read for the aspiring satirist and would-be social critic.

Roughly ten years before the movie was made, came the book by Terry Southern, a look at the world of Guy Grand, that eccentric billionaire who concocts outrageous schemes in order to prove that everyone has their price and turns the perceptions and worlds of ordinary people upside down in the process. It's okay if one is the audience witnessing those schemes, but quite another if one is on the receiving end, e.g. the Musk and Tallow scents.

The action jets back and forth to Guy and his two aunts the fuzzy-brained Esther and the pert and serious Agnes, and a history of his antics, which is of course the core of the story.
As for the interludes with the aunts and Ginger Horton, the rational Guy, who doesn't seem to miss much, tries to remain aloof, saying the right words in an off-handed way, and really speaking when the subject turns towards anything relating to business.

The dog show involving the panther, the theatre where Guy shows a cheap foreign film instead of a musical, then reshowing the cheap film upside down, violating copyright laws by making his own film inserts in Mrs. Miniver and The Best Years Of Our Lives, the pygmy who became CEO of an accounting firm, and of course, the chaos that takes place aboard the Magic Christian vessel.

The Do-It-Yourself books are something that might actually catch on, assuming there isn't already something like that out on the market. Purists might cringe but that only proves the follies of being a hardcore devotee. The conventionally wise response is, "Hey, it's only a book," or "it's only a movie..." etc.

The healthy satire of the media that Guy promotes, where actors walk off the set after spouting off words saying "I pity the moron whose life is so empty he would look at this" could be used today. I don't watch any contemporary American TV programs and when I see previews or commercial spots for them, that's what I feel, to use the line from All Our Yesterdays: "Anyone who would allow this slobbering pomp and drivel to his home has less sense and taste than the beasts of the field!"

The humdrum of life should be interrupted by some of Grand's schemes. Smashing crackers on the sidewalk with a sledge, now that's something anyone can do, with a borrowed helmet and overalls. And remember, "It's technical."

At 147 pages, The Magic Christian should be a quick and fun read even for today's illiterati, assuming we can get them to turn off the Stupidbowl, Worm Series, or hide their PS2's.

Why bother with a bio of hipster Terry Southern?Author tries a tongue in cheek run, but that does not work . Southern, by this account , was an alcoholic who made his living scribbling lines for B movies. Check that the author is a Canadian who does not have the slightest idea of what life was like in Terry Southern's haunts.Read this only if you wish to see what low grade stuff publishers are shoeveling onto the market these days .

I happen to agree with the sentiments espoused by Harold Leffingwell (see review above). Poor Lee Hill was disserved by his editors, who permitted him to compile a 'Terry Southern and his times' tome that is chock-a-block with cliches and party lists, and lacking in critical focus of the man. It tries to be both cultural history and biography, and fails on both counts. However, this is the first and badly needed biography of a man who brought fame and fortune to dozens of other people, and Hill deserves to be commended for his years of spade-work.

Hill has no feel for American culture. He is apparently a Canadian who spent some time in London and is primarily a film historian. His sense of cultural history in a broader scale is ludicrously third-hand, delivered in broad generalities on the order of, "America was in the grip of repressive McCarthyism in the early fifties," or "Many well-meaning people were concerned about the plight of the negro."

Paradoxically, Hill titles his book 'A Grand Guy,' although his lack of feel for modern American cultural history makes it impossible for him to tell us where Terry Southern's 'Grand Guy' persona came from. The 'Grand Guy' act, a compound of heartiness, mock-haughty superciliousness, and college-humor hyperbole, was a standard persona for those of Southern's generation. Many of Southern's contemporaries (from Gore Vidal to Bill Buckley and even Norman Mailer) played the same notes on their fiddles. This act was a continuation of the tongue-in-cheek snootiness you find in the early years of the Luce publications (where Time letter writers would be accorded a put-down caption on the order of, "Let Subscriber Brailsford Mend His Ways!") as well as The New Yorker (think of Peter Arno's captions or E.B. White's snotty captions for squibs pulled from local newspapers). This was the accepted "hip" idiom for the 20th Century Quality-Lit man, and it reached its full effulgence in the Esquire of the 1960s, when an unrelenting, over-the-top mockery of sacred cows became the mark of sophistication. Southern's tragedy, perhaps, is that he got stuck in what was essentially a passing style of ephemeral journalism, and he was unable to grow beyond it, and he had no friends to encourage him to grow beyond it. Thus, by the early 70s, his output was reduced to self-parodying letters to his friend and imitator at the National Lampoon, Michael O'Donoghue.

excellent and direly-needed bio in these irony-free days. a great picture of the swinging 60's too.

This book is a rehash of the short stories published in "Red Dirt Marijuana and other tastes", which are more consise, better focused, and include some Reporting Mr. Southern did placing him a few years ahead of Hunter Thompson in the Gonzo Sweepstakes.

Southern's last novel, completed in 1992, was the result of an on-again, off-again thirty-year effort to write a real exploration of his childhood in rural Texas. Although it borrows settings and scenes from stories originally completed in the 50s, the novel delves much further into the life of the young Texan Harold and his move into adolescence. A strange coming-of-age novel it is indeed, since Harold's introductions to the world of adult life are not through baseball, fishing, or books, but through marijuana, knife fights, and panty-peeping; the book is very much Southern's version of "A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man." A poignant and elegantly comic memoir of youth.