United States History - Southern Region, State & Local U.S. Government, United States History - General & Miscellaneous, Politics & Government - General & Miscellaneous, Civilization - History

Whistling Dixie

Name: Whistling Dixie
Author: John Shelton Reed
ISBN: 9780156961745

by John Shelton Reed

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Overview

Reed dissects topics both whimsical and important, from university courses for eliminating one's southern accent, to northerners moving south, to the permutations of barbecue, to race....The South is a funny place, he says, now more than ever.

A witty and sometimes outrageous collection of essays presenting one Southerner's viewpoint about what makes the South the South. As the Washington Post said, "Reed knows his region intimately, probably as well as anyone around, and manages the impressive feat of regarding it both seriously and lightly."

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Editorials

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

In this humorous, perceptive collection, Reed, professor of sociology at the University of North Carolina, gathers his essays which have appeared in Southern publications, among them Daily Tar Heel and Georgia Historical Quarterly . The pieces, most of them on pop culture, with side ventures into politics and religion, reveal the author to be an unreconstructed, if enlightened Rebel, a political conservative but not an ideologue, and a cheerleader for the qualities he finds admirable in Southern life today, such as politeness, self-reliance and the desire to eradicate racial injustice. Reed also praises less universally appealing ``Southern cooking''--his recipe for Vienna sausage sandwiches will turn every stomach north of Richmond--but otherwise readers will find this collection palatable. Oct.

Booknews

Most of these writings originally appeared in Chronicles; a magazine of American culture, many in Southern partisan, the rest in four other publications. Reed (sociology and American studies, U. of North Carolina) writes of the South gracefully, wittily, sagely. (He observes that the contested just because all the players have SATs higher than their body weights the best teams money can buy.) Annotation c. Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)