American Humor - Peoples & Cultures, Travel - General & Miscellaneous, Travel and Transportation - Humor

Sleeping at the Starlite Motel

Name: Sleeping at the Starlite Motel
Author: Bailey White
ISBN: 9780786205554

by Bailey White

Write a review

Overview

In Sleeping at the Starlite Motel Bailey White explores how places affect our lives, from her humid hometown in Georgia to a one-room school in Vermont. She takes us on adventures as mild as crawling through a limestone cave and as risky as deciding to teach first grade. She introduces us to her cousin Mandon, who wants to reunite the family's far-flung Chippendale chairs, and she tries to explain how, when she was assigned to computer training, she ended up at the dog track. Sometimes hilarious, sometimes touching, Bailey White's stories are always rich with perception and grace.

The acclaimed author of Mama Makes Up Her Mind--a rollicking success with more than 40 weeks on the New York Times bestseller list--returns with a brand-new collection of indelible portraits of people and places she's encountered in her travels and around her hometown--stories which "evoke a sort of real-life Lake Wobegon" (New York Times).

About the Author, Bailey White

Bailey White teaches elementary school in south Georgia, her writing has appeared in many magazines and newspapers, and her bestselling book Mama Makes Up Her Mind was nominated for the Southern Book Award and the ABBY Award. She is also a regular commentator on National Public Radio's All things Considered.

Reviews

There are no reviews yet. Log in to write one.

Editorials

Library Journal

In the South, someone is called an "embroiderer" if they tend to tell true stories with more than a little poetic license. In White's earlier collection (Bailey White: An Interesting Life, Audio Reviews, LJ 2/15/93) it was hard to tell where the truth left off and the embroidery began. Some of the stories in Sleeping at the Starlite Motel, however, have visible if lovely stitches. Still, White's Austenesque observations remain clear-eyed and dead on the mark. As before, her everyday characters are extraordinarily memorable. There's Nockerd Sockett, whose cheerful triumph over earlier tragedies crumbles under the weight of false accusation. There's the fruit-tree man, Red the rat man, and Great-Great Aunt Rose and her exquisite shroud. This gem of a collection, ably read by the author, is sure to have wide appeal and should absolutely be in every library collection.-Reilly Reagan, Putnam Cty. Lib., Cookeville, Tenn.

From The Critics

Those who made "Mama Makes Up Her Mind" (1993) a surprise best-seller will be happy to know that the alligator Aunt Belle trained to bellow for a treat returns in this book. Not many of the other real-life characters from "Mama" do, though, not even indomitable Mama herself. Maybe that's because White's sketches this time report excursions about town, region, nation, even the world: in the very first piece, she reveals that she regularly whisks over to Paris to visit a friend, then adds that her earliest memory is of seeing in a Pompeii museum (Pompeii, "Italy") a dog that was turned into charcoal by Vesuvius. The little lady's been around. But she refracts her experiences through the prism of her own bemused, wry, warmly human humor. She's rather a classical humorist: she vividly renders the peculiar temperament of each person she writes about--she gives the unique "feel" of a character in a particular situation rather than a rounded characterization--and sometimes the effect of her humor is other than funny. But always, like a good surrealist painting, a Bailey White sketch makes an indelible impression, and usually it "is" funny to boot.

From Barnes & Noble

Exploring the effect of places on our lives, the author recounts wonderful, rich, and slightly eccentric stories from her past, filled with old mansions, quirky relatives, and life-changing decisions. "A unique, engaging voice." --Chicago Tribune.