South Toward Home: Adventures and Misadventures in My Native Land

About this book

In considering the pleasures and absurdities of her native culture Julia Reed quotes another Southern writer Willie Morris who said Its the juxtapositions that get you down here. These juxtapositions are for Julia the soul of the South and in her warmhearted and funny new book South Toward Home she chronicles her adventures through the highs and the lows of Southern lifetaking us everywhere from dive bars and the Delta Hot Tamale Festival to an impromptu shindig on a Mississippi River sandbar and a coveted seat on a Mardi Gras float. She writes about the regions music and food its pesky critters and prodigious drinking habits its inhabitants penchant for making their own funand crucially their gift for laughing at themselves. With her distinctive voice and knowing eye Julia also provides her take on the Souths more embarrassing characteristics from the politics of lust and the persistence of dry counties to the seemingly bottomless propensity for committing a whole lot of craziness in the name of the Lord. No matter what she writes My fellow Southerners have brought me the greatest joyon the page over the airwaves around the dinner table at the bar or hell in the checkout line. South Toward Home with a foreword by Jon Meacham is Julia Reeds valentine to the place she knows and loves best.