Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #1666751 in Books
• Published on: 2002-05-07
• Released on: 2002-05-07
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 256 pages

From Amazon.com
There are some preconceptions about southern traditions that need to be clarified. Moonshining is no longer the pastime of grizzled Deliverance yahoos, but a multimillion-dollar business laced with SWAT-style raids; squirrel brains probably aren't responsible for neurological disorders; and in Louisiana, a good cockfight is fun for the whole family. These are some of the enlightened reports delivered by Burkhard Bilger as he explores the stereotypical, eclectic habits of southerners from West Virginia to Oklahoma. Despite Bilger's journalistic pedigree (he is an editor with The Sciences and Discover, and has credits in The Atlantic and Harper's, where his cockfighting piece, "Enter the Chicken" previously appeared), he slips into nostalgia just enough to romanticize a squirrel hunt, or raise a game of backwoods marbles into an Olympic march of glory.

Bilger kicks off the tour from his hometown in Oklahoma, where he "noodles"--thrashes a limb around in catfish-thick waters--hoping to land a fabled 80-pound monster with his bare hands. In Louisiana he challenges the misgivings any nonenthusiast might have about cockfighting. Even though it's illegal in most of the country, the bloodsport is thriving in the Bayou State, replete with trade magazines, well-produced venues, and American Kennel Club-worthy breeding strategies. The same passion for efficiency goes into the moonshining business, where Bilger is taken under the wing of one of the few shiners willing to lead him through his sourmash operation. A few nights later, however, Bilger is on the other side, on a raid with the local sheriff. Squirrel-brain consumption is still popular in hamlets throughout Kentucky, even after a report published in the New England Journal of Medicine blamed a neurological disease on the dish. Frog legs, one Georgia entrepreneur claims, will soon replace chicken, and southern cooking--the kind that features chitlins, pigs feet, and collards--has become haute cuisine in Atlanta. Back in Oklahoma, Bilger connects with a coonhound trainer during a long night's raccoon chase, and he follows the success of a backwoods marble team who shaped their shooters in the granite-strewn streams of Tennessee. Bilger treats each eccentric character with a distant respect and hints at the melancholy of losing tradition, no matter how bizarre. --Lolly Merrell

From Publishers Weekly
It's refreshing to read a book about Southern subcultures that doesn't bog down in easy caricature or yet another Confederate flag discussion. Bilger, a journalist and features editor at Discover, writes with deadpan grace to capture half-buried worlds, linking the vivid participants to a larger historyAwhether it be the transatlantic heritage of soul food, the legal and illegal sides of cockfighting in America or the evolution of coondogs since the time of "the father of coon hunting," George Washington. The title essay describes the squirmy practice of "noodling" one's bare fingers inside a catfish's underwater hiding place until the toothed fish bites hard enough to be hauled to the surface. In his exploration of Louisiana cockfighting, Bilger pulls off something that easily could have backfired: he contrasts the rooster farm of John Demoruelle (where the cocks are pampered like feathered celebrities) with the anonymous violence of the modern chicken factory. As Bilger tours a Tyson chicken facility, the spectacle of the young birds riding passively to their conveyor-belt deaths complicates the reader's feelings about the comparatively glorious (but bloody) lives of the gamecocks. In other essaysAabout a South Carolina "moonshiner's reunion," an Oklahoma coon-treeing competition and a visit with Kentuckians whose delicacy is squirrel brainsABilger always sees past the freak show to get the full, resonant story, often of older cultures retreating before the new. Readers who liked the Southern exotica of Confederates in the Attic or Mullett Heads should enjoy this promising debut about "the forgotten folkways [that] still inhabit our back roads." (Sept..
- still inhabit our back roads." (Sept.)
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal
Odd, regional Southern cultures seemingly fascinate readers in the rest of the country. When Bilger, an editor at Discover, who was born in Oklahoma and now lives in Brooklyn, NY, was learning to play country blues guitar, he decided that he needed a hound as an audience. His search for a coondog in New England led him into the world of cockfighting in Louisiana, eating squirrel brains in Kentucky, and moonshining in Virginia. This quirky collection of essays records Bilger's adventures dissecting the history and practice of eight peculiar Southern pastimes. The resulting book, while chockfull of trivia and folklore, isn't for the fainthearted, delicate, or animal lover. Readers who enjoyed Tom Franklin's Poachers (Morrow, 1999) and Brad Watson's Last Days of the Dog Men (Norton, 1996) will like this. Incidentally, the author finally found his hound in Massachusetts. Pam Kingsbury, Alabama Humanities Foundation Speakers Bureau, Florence
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.