The Redneck Way of Knowledge
Blanche McCrary BoydOverview
This intoxicating book by the author of The Revolution of Little Girls combines autobiography, reporting, and the dressed-up lies we call fiction. An underground classic since its initial publication, it is the wildly funny personal testament of Blanche McCrary Boyd, sixties radical and born-againÀ Southerner, a lesbian with an un-P.C. passion for skydiving and stock-car racing, a graduate of Esalen and kundalini yoga who now takes her altered states "raw, like oysters."The Redneck Way of Knowledge is about family reunions and kamikaze love affairs. It is about crashing an arts festival with two precociously decayed Charleston aristocrats and watching the Pope deliver Communion at Yankee Stadium. It is about the selves we try on and slough off on the way to becoming who we are. Throughout, Blanche Boyd travels the expressway between the realm of the senses and the state of grace, and reports on the journey in prose that combines riotous humor, diamond-hard intelligence, and savage lyricism.
Combining autobiography, reporting, and the dressed-up lies called fiction, this is the uncensored personal testimony of Blanche McCrary Boyd: sixties radical and born-again Southerner; a lesbian with a highly un-P.C. passion for stock-car racing; a graduate of Esalen and kundalini yoga who now takes her altered states "raw, like oysters." "Superb."--The Nation.
Editorials
Library Journal
In this collection of 11 essays-some humorous, some serious-Boyd offers her personal take on such varied events as drag races and amateur boxing nights, Pope John Paul II's mass at Yankee Stadium, and the Greensboro Nazi-Klan murders. Though LJ's reviewer found the pieces a bit self-absorbed at times, he also discovered "sharp insights into family and friends, race, and politics" (LJ 5/15/82).Rita Mae Brown
Vibrate[s] with originality.—Washington Post Book World