Bücher von John Shelton Reed

If you think that nowadays the South is pretty much just a hot Midwest, meet John Shelton Reed: "Americans need to be reminded that there are good-sized regional differences in this country. So I'm volunteering to help with this reminding." Readers on both sides of the Late Unpleasantness will savor this witty and sometimes outrageous collection of essays presenting one Sutherner's viewpoint about what makes the South the South. (Reed on creeping homogenization, for example: "Atlanta represents what a quarter of a million Confederate soldiers died to prevent." Or on Southern manners: "A joke going around here asks why Southern women don't like group sex. Give up? Too many thank-you notes.")

With characteristic tongue-in-cheek wit, Reed tackles the questions, Just what is ?the South? today? Where is it? Why are Southerners so devoted to it? Instructional maps include ?Where Kudzu Grows? and ?States Mentioned in Country Music Lyrics.?

In the years following World War I, the New Orleans French Quarter attracted artists and writers with its low rents and colourful street life. A young William Faulkner resided among the "artful and crafty ones of the French Quarter." In Dixie Bohemia John Shelton Reed brings to life the people and places of New Orleans in the Jazz Age.

In the informal, engaging essays brought together in One South, John Shelton Reed focuses on the South's strong regional identity and on the persistence, well into the last decades if the twentieth century, of Southern cultural distinctiveness.

For over three decades John Shelton Reed has been "minding" the South