About this item
Highlights
- Too often depicted as a region with a single, dominant history and a static culture, the American South actually comprises a wide range of unique places and cultures, each with its own history and evolving identity.
- About the Author: John Shelton Reed, author of a dozen books, innumerable articles, and a country song about the South, served as the Chancellor of the Fellowship of Southern Writers and is cofounder and Éminence Grease of the Campaign for Real Barbecue (TrueCue.org).
- 312 Pages
- Social Science, Popular Culture
Description
Book Synopsis
Too often depicted as a region with a single, dominant history and a static culture, the American South actually comprises a wide range of unique places and cultures, each with its own history and evolving identity. John Shelton Reed's Mixing It Up is a medley of writings that examine how ideas of the South, and what it means to be southern, have changed over the last century. Through essays, op-eds, speeches, statistical reports, elegies, panegyrics, feuilletons, rants, and more, Reed's penetrating observations, wry humor, and expansive knowledge help him to examine the South's past, survey its present, and venture a few modest predictions about its future. Touching on an array of topics from the region's speech, manners, and food, to politics, religion, and race relations, Reed also assesses the work of other pundits, scholars, and South-watchers.
From Appalachia to New Orleans, Mixing it Up: A South-Watcher's Miscellany offers a collection of lively prose and provocative observations about this ever-changing region and its people.Review Quotes
John Shelton Reeds' Mixing It Up--miscellaneous writings on the 'Northern part of the Gulf-Caribbean region, ' aka 'the South'--is as deeply pleasurable, challenging, and culturally rich an experience as going to a pig pickin' with William Faulkner, Zora Neale Hurston, and Flannery O'Connor. It's that good.--Peter Bearman, author of Working for Respect: Community and Conflict at Walmart
In Mixing It Up, the most prolific and sagacious South-sayer of his generation and more has dealt us not just a hand, but a whole deck-full of winners.--James C. Cobb, author of The South and America Since World War II
Like his sociological mentors Howard Odom and Rupert Vance, John Shelton Reed is rooted in the culture he describes so insightfully and cares about so deeply. He is fiercely independent, sardonic, witty, and sometimes just hilariously funny. No one writes better about the ironic contradictions of Southerners.--Wayne Flynt, author of Southern Religion and Christian Diversity in the Twentieth Century
About the Author
John Shelton Reed, author of a dozen books, innumerable articles, and a country song about the South, served as the Chancellor of the Fellowship of Southern Writers and is cofounder and Éminence Grease of the Campaign for Real Barbecue (TrueCue.org). He lives in Chatham County, North Carolina, and taught for many years at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill.