Review by New York Times Review
what to read and why By Francine Prose. (Harper, $23.99.) The novelist and critic combines previously published essays, reviews and introductions with some new writing to offer a wonderful reading list, ranging from Jane Austen to Jennifer Egan, cat flap By Alan S. Cowell. (St. Martin's, $24.99.) Cowell, a former foreign correspondent for The Times, tells a story with a Kafkaesque twist. A woman discovers that while away on a business trip, she has left part of her consciousness behind in the body of her cat. how to be famous By Caitlin Moran. (Harper, $26.99.) Moran, the British author of "How to Build a Girl," centers this novel on a 19-year-old journalist for a music magazine. Her unrequited love for a rock star and the unbridled pursuit of fame and fortune land her in some predictable trouble, obama By Brian Abrams. (Little A, $24.95.) For his fourth oral history - after producing books on "Late Night With David Letterman," Gawker and the film "Die Hard" - Abrams turns to no less than the Obama administration. It's the first comprehensive attempt at such a project, bringing together the anecdotes and eyewitness accounts of dozens of people who were part of the Obama White House, from cabinet secretaries to speechwriters. south toward home By Julia Reed. (St. Martin's, $25.99.) A contributor to Garden & Gun magazine and a resident of New Orleans, Reed writes a paean to the spirit and culture of the South. "There could be no better moment to read FLIGHT AGAINST TIME, by the acclaimed Lebanese author Emily Nasrallah, who died in March. The novel, set at the start of Lebanon's civil war in 1975 and published in 1981, throbs with detail about specifically Lebanese landscapes and social dynamics, yet it also encompasses themes roiling global politics today, from refugee crises to wrenching questions of identity. Reading it days after moving away from Beirut, where we lived blocks from Nasrallah for six years, I am particularly susceptible to her description of Radwan, an aging rural grandfather gazing at his village as he leaves to travel for the first time outside Lebanon. 'Suddenly he felt waves of strange tenderness that flowed from his heart, welled up in his eyes and ran down in tears,' she writes. 'Even the atoms of dust flying around him and settling on his shoes were as dear as gold. Radwan makes his way to Canada, where his children have emigrated. But he finds himself unsure where he fits: a new world of strange surroundings or back home where most of 'the young ones' have fled and where it may no longer be safe to return." - ANNE BARNARD, BEIRUT BUREAU CHIEF, ON WHAT SHE'S READING.
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [August 2, 2018]
Review by Booklist Review
Although Reed is a southerner, born and bred, her worldly adventures in places such as Manhattan and Washington, D.C., give her a broader appreciation for the region's charms and quirks and things like bourbon and Delta blues, possums and gators, tamales, fried chicken, and gumbo. And while she may chronicle her homeland's eccentricities, she wisely positions them within the framework of the larger world. Boarding school and summer camps can be universal experiences, as can road trips and holiday dinners. She adores her home in New Orleans, reveres her Mississippi upbringing, revels in the fact that her heritage is both proud and a little outrageous. Garden & Gun contributor Reed's latest paean to southern culture is loving in the way of a parent indulging a capricious child. Yet the way she brings this same perspective to the greater human condition is shrewd and imaginative. One need not be of the South to appreciate her wisdom and wit, for Reed's is an expressive and enthusiastic voice for humanity everywhere.--Haggas, Carol Copyright 2010 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Reed's collection of snappy columns from the Southern lifestyle magazine Garden & Gun makes for an inviting way to ease into summer reading, even for those who have never ventured below the Mason-Dixon line. She describes growing up in a rarified South, one that included impressive guests at family parties-William F. Buckley, for one-and debutante balls, but her writing transcends socioeconomic boundaries as easily as geographic ones. A top-notch storyteller, Reed relates early memories ranging from a case of adolescent heartbreak that resulted in her triumphant discovery of "the healing power of glamour," to the complete neglect of her beloved first car. A Southern book would be incomplete without a discussion of food, and Reed does not disappoint, with nods to fried chicken, Kool-Aid pickles (aka the Koolickle), various pig parts, and the Delta tamale. Most memorable, perhaps, are Reed's stories about entertaining, from "insanely over the top" boat rides on the Mississippi to a raucous Thanksgiving celebration pairing turkey with mint juleps. Reed is hilarious and charmingly irreverent, and her ability to capture an element of Southern life in a phrase ("God, Gators and Gumbo" for Louisiana) or to describe, in a short sentence or two, a funny, sweet memory of 40 years ago, are the marks of a true talent. (June) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Kirkus Book Review
A Mississippi native returns to the South to revel in the "typically jarring contradictions" of Dixie.Garden Gun contributing editor Reed (Julia Reed's South: Spirited Entertaining and High-Style Fun All Year Long, 2016, etc.) logged time in newsrooms up North, but she found it necessary, in time, to get herself back home. Even though "it's hot as hell, the mosquitoes are murderous, and we all might be half crazy," there's something about the region that can't be bottled up and carried away. In this scattering of essays, the author hits on some of the high points and plenty of the low, perhaps the lowest being the whole Honey Boo Boo thing, which a friend of hers characterized with rough poetic justice as "Peckerwood Mayhem." For her part, Reed wryly notes the oddity of the fact that the show appeared on a network once called The Learning Channel. The author demonstrates an indexical bent, enumerating the things that make the South what it is: the highest incidence of diabetes, a still-high number of cigarette smokers, "the most violent crime, the most guns, and the most shooting deaths." In all this, she paints with a surprisingly broad brush given that the South is really a concatenation of Souths: Virginia is not Alabama is not Texas, despite some shared rounded vowels. Reed makes for a knowing commentator on debutante balls, pecan pies, and the relative merits of Scotch versus bourbon. Still, the collection sometimes hangs together too loosely, as if an excuse to pull together Reed's columns from her magazine. There's nothing terrible in it, but the disquisitions on such things as whether women should carry flasks ("they are also crucial to have on hand in times of stress, duress, or just plain boredom) and a playlist of Southern tunes (featuring, natch, "Sweet Home Alabama") seem to be mostly filler.A mixed bag but useful for explaining the South to Yankeesand perhaps to some Southerners, too. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
