Long Time Leaving: Dispatches from Up South [DECKLE EDGE] (Hardcover)

~ (Author)

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Starred Review. Ever since beloved Southern writer Blount moved to Massachusetts, he's been trying to use his "regional ambivalence...to get Aunt Dixie and Uncle Sam on speaking terms." In this diverse collection of humorous essays and occasional verse, Blount tackles a number of topics, including Emmanuel Kant, the mind-boggling "Bushy Juggernaut" and the correct grammatical usage of y'all (always plural). Concerned largely with his own pleasures and peccadilloes, Blount sings the praises of New Orleans's jazzy Boswell sisters, staying up late and the company of Jack Russell terriers ("like living with a movie star who seems to be able to handle quite a lot of cocaine). On the other hand, Tom DeLay of Texas gets called "the thinking person's Satan," Garth Brooks and Forrest Gump both receive snubs, and caring about college sports in the Northeast draws comparison to "caring about French food in South Carolina." Adorned with poetical lists and quirky details, Blount's work is unflaggingly passionate and provocative over a range of subjects, including food, politics and all things Southern, and he's as likely to quote The Women's Times as Shakespeare or Zora Neale Hurston. A lively curmudgeon who's talked to just about everyone on just about everything (especially grits), Blount's energetic, unpredictable essays are sure-fire fan-pleasers, and fine discoveries for newcomers.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From Booklist

It's gotta be tough to be Roy Blount Jr., a displaced southern liberal living in the Northeast. To hear him tell it, just about everyone he ever meets invariably blurts out something along the lines of "You know, the thing about the South is that it's just so [insert deprecatory simplification here]." Fortunately, Blount bristles at each and every one of them in the 70 or so pieces in this collection, culled mainly from articles and columns written for various publications. Although admittedly they begin to take on the quality of a broken record when lumped together, at least the needle is stuck on a pretty heady groove. With humor so dry you might miss it, Blount's flexible musings on all manner of subjects--history, politics, limericks, songs, food, songs about food--are uniformly sharp, even if he sometimes falls into making the same sort of sweeping generalizations that work him into such a lather to begin with. Droll but not necessarily folksy, and often rankled but never cantankerous, Blount is a quintessential opinionist when he writes, "I just wish the South would let me decide what it should change and what it shouldn't." Now watch him shake his fist and give 'em all what-for. Ian Chipman
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 400 pages
• Publisher: Knopf; First Edition edition (May 1, 2007)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0307266184
• ISBN-13: 978-0307266187
• Product Dimensions: 9.4 x 6.5 x 1.3 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.4 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (8 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #368,721 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

30 of 33 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Actually 4.5 stars but there isn't a button for that, May 23, 2007

By	Luanne Jones "humbled author" (Kentucky) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

This review is from: Long Time Leaving: Dispatches From Up South (Audio CD)

I got this on audio because I don't just love Blount's writing, I love his voice and the way he says things and phrases them, I even love his pauses. His accent got me through a near 2 year exile in the Great Forsaken Flatlands (Kansas City, MO) where a kind word much less a familiar turn of phrase was hard to come by -- so I really wish I could have given this book the full five stars. But, well, I just found it uneven. Some really good stuff mixed in with stuff that felt like it was just there to fill up the page, or the time if you were listening on audio. Still and all, every essay had something worth taking away from it and that's more than you can say about most things you read. And when Blount is good, he is charming, funny and right on.

10 of 10 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Yee-haw! (or words to that effect), August 9, 2007

By	Bennett L. Steelman (Wilmington, North Carolina United States) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

Besides being a brilliant specimen of that endangered species, The White Southern Liberal, Blount is about as funny as any humanoid on the planet. "Long Time Leaving," an anthology of some of his occasional pieces, proves a little repetitious at points (how many times do you need to remind folks that "y'all" is plural?) but it offers a fine selection of his more amusing material. Few writers are capable of more deadly similes: For example, Blount's observation that Lewis Grizzard is to Southern humor as Stuckey's pecan logs are to Southern home cookin', or that Garth Brooks songs are like Waffle House waffles "except that every now and then a Waffle House waffle hits the spot." Blount flits from topic to topic like a fly on fertilizer, but that only serves to underline his point that Southerners aren't great abstract thinkers; they're more at home with the concrete and particular, which is their peculiar strength.

7 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Observations of American life with a gimlet Southern eye..., August 1, 2007

By	Vermeer fan (Atlanta, GA) - See all my reviews

Despite being ensconced-or maybe because of-in the Berkshires, Mr. Blount casts an uneasy eye on contemporary Southern life and the larger American political scene. One gets the sense that since his Massachusetts neighbors and New York coworkers feel compelled to call upon him to explain certain Southern folkways and news events that the author has taken the time to distill his childhood and college years in the South into a bourbon that fuels his philosophizing.

The book is a collection of his essays that have appeared in various periodicals from the mid 1990's and later-food, travel, covering the KKK, life in Manhattan, the blues, a pinch of this and a smidgin of that. You have to have lived a couple of decades-mid 1950s and up would help-to get some of the references-or be willing to investigate the names, dates and places Mr. Blount mentions. You can read a couple of the essays before bed or a whole section on a lazy Sunday morning-it's easy to pick up and put down without losing track, kind of like an ongoing conversation with a friend. A well read, post graduate educated, erudite friend who hides behind the visage of a good ol' boy. The porch light is on and someone is definitely at home...

One caveat-the author is enamoured of a certain joke he uses to illustrate a point. Mr. Blount please get another line besides the "Do you believe in infant baptism? "H--l, I've seen one!"