Long Time Leaving: Dispatches from Up South

Great book. However, it is much better in Audio Format!!! The author's reading makes it an instant one-man theater. The audio book also gives you an idea how he meant for certain things to be said. So my impression is that you get more out of this book by listening to Roy Blount Jr. reading it. We got lots of laughs out of it. And used it as an entertainment when we have guests over, especially the part called "The Way Folks Were Meant to Eat". At this point all our friends and neighbors got exposed to this book :) Some parts of this book are on a long monotonous side. But they are minor comparing to the rest. So over all this book is great.

Great Listen! Roy Blount Jr. has been an editor at Sports Illustrated, an editor at the Atlantic Monthly, written numerous books, and still finds himself called on to explain to his New England Liberal friends "why do Southerners eat dirt?" and "have you eaten squirrel?". Narrated in his own Georgian drawl, it's a hoot! You'll pee your pants!

Besides being a brilliant specimen of that endangered species, The White Southern Liberal, Blount is about as funny as any humanoid on the planet. "Long Time Leaving," an anthology of some of his occasional pieces, proves a little repetitious at points (how many times do you need to remind folks that "y'all" is plural?) but it offers a fine selection of his more amusing material. Few writers are capable of more deadly similes: For example, Blount's observation that Lewis Grizzard is to Southern humor as Stuckey's pecan logs are to Southern home cookin', or that Garth Brooks songs are like Waffle House waffles "except that every now and then a Waffle House waffle hits the spot." Blount flits from topic to topic like a fly on fertilizer, but that only serves to underline his point that Southerners aren't great abstract thinkers; they're more at home with the concrete and particular, which is their peculiar strength.

I got this on audio because I don't just love Blount's writing, I love his voice and the way he says things and phrases them, I even love his pauses. His accent got me through a near 2 year exile in the Great Forsaken Flatlands (Kansas City, MO) where a kind word much less a familiar turn of phrase was hard to come by -- so I really wish I could have given this book the full five stars. But, well, I just found it uneven. Some really good stuff mixed in with stuff that felt like it was just there to fill up the page, or the time if you were listening on audio. Still and all, every essay had something worth taking away from it and that's more than you can say about most things you read. And when Blount is good, he is charming, funny and right on.