Crackers

by Roy Blount Jr.

Have you ever asked yourself, Am I southern? If not geographically, then deep down, at heart? Or, if I am not southern myself, do I know people who are southern, whom I misunderstand? Is there some authority I should consult?

Crackers . Without this book, you will just flail around in the shallows of Southernity, with nothing solid to hold onto. Roy Blount Jr. puts you in touch with possums, heterosexist dancing, people named Junior, a two-headed four-armed three-legged gospel-singing man, your feelings about the Carter administration. These specifics take you out into the depths.

As a character in Crackers puts it, "I don't read books about the South, but I read southern books. Hoooo, people stealing one another's wooden legs, setting fires, making tarbabies out of one another. . . ."

Crackers is a southern book.

Genres: Humor, Nonfiction

324 pages, Paperback

First published January 12, 1982

About the author

Roy Blount Jr. is the author of twenty-three books. The first, About Three Bricks Shy of a Load, was expanded into About Three Bricks Shy . . . and the Load Filled Up. It is often called one of the best sports books of all time. His subsequent works have taken on a range of subjects, from Duck Soup, to Robert E. Lee, to what cats are thinking, to how to savor New Orleans, to what it’s like being married to the first woman president of the United States.

Blount is a panelist on NPR’s Wait Wait . . . Don’t Tell Me!, an ex-president of the Authors Guild, a usage consultant for the American Heritage Dictionary, a New York Public Library Literary Lion, and a member of both the Fellowship of Southern Writers and the band the Rock Bottom Remainders.

In 2009, Blount received the University of North Carolina’s Thomas Wolfe Prize. The university cited “his voracious appetite for the way words sound and for what they really mean.” Time places Blount “in the tradition of the great curmudgeons like H. L. Mencken and W. C. Fields.” Norman Mailer has said, “Page for page, Roy Blount is as funny as anyone I’ve read in a long time.” Garrison Keillor told the Paris Review, “Blount is the best. He can be literate, uncouth, and soulful all in one sentence.”

Blount’s essays, articles, stories, and verses have appeared in over one hundred and fifty publications, including the New Yorker, the New York Times, Esquire, the Atlantic, Sports Illustrated, the Oxford American, and Garden & Gun. He comes from Decatur, Georgia, and lives in western Massachusetts.

Reviews

[Clayton Brannon · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book is dated by the time frame and material that it covers. Saying that it was still a good read and brought laughter from me. If you lived through the Jimmy Carter years then you will enjoy this book and if you are to young to remember those days you will need the computer near by to look up who many of the people are he talks about. I still recommend the book as it is a really funny and revealing book about a lost time in American history.

[Jeff Crompton · Rating 4 out of 5]

I recently reread this early book by one of my favorite humor writers, and enjoyed it much more this time around than I did when I first read it years ago. It originally appeared during Jimmy Carter's presidency, and can seen as Blount's attempt to explain the South, Jimmy Carter, and Billy Carter to the rest of the country. It's somewhat dated at this point - we've come a long way in terms of race and prejudice against Southerners since the 1970's - but Blount's insights and story-telling ability make it still worth reading.

[Afnan Hafiz]

Funny and Crazy! If you want to laugh, this is one thing which WILL make you laugh!

[Jay]

I don't think the crackers in this book live on the ritz. Mmmm...Ritz crackers.