Customer Reviews

Why Dogs Chase Cars: Tales of a Beleaguered Boyhood (Shannon Ravenel Books)

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Being from the South I thoroughly enjoyed this book! I'm not sure if it takes another Southerner to appreciate the hilarity in this book, but I doubt it. I laughed so hard I almost hated it when my metro stop arrived! I know the other riders thought I was insane. The tale of a boy growing up in 1970 South Carolina with a father who just really isn't all there. Tales of his father burying items in the back yard to antics of simple-minded, backward-town folk kept me rolling. This book is a quick read not only because of the length of book but because you just can't put it down - waiting for the next laugh, which just a paragraph away.

A while back, I heard an interview with George Singleton on the radio, reading from his book The Halk-Mammals of Dixie. The clip was so funny, that I rushed out and bought the book (which is worth the purchase price for the title alone!)

When this book fell into my hands, I didn't realize at first it was the same author, until I read the blurb on the back cover. This book is a collection of stories, which flow together quite nicely, and evoke so clearly the quirkiness of some of our small southern towns. Maybe it takes a certain type of Southerner to appreciate this fully, but I think that 'most anyone could.

The stories all are told by Mendal Dawes, who is raised by his eccentric (some might say drunken or plain out loony-tunes) dad after his mother skipped town . Mendal's greatest desire is to escape from his hometown of Forty-Five SC. The stories take the reader through Mendal's childhood there, where his father buries stuff (ie fake Burma shave signs advertising a Baptist church, yard sticks in preparation for the conversion to the metric system, and other random objects) in their backyard, creates a fake toxic waste dump nearby to stymie future land developers, makes Mendal recite Marx and Durkheim, and dreams up scads of other oddball plots and schemes. Mendal is periodically aided and abetted by his friend Compton (also motherless, whose father is Mendal's dad's drinking buddy) and Shirley Ebo ('the only black girl preintegration at Forty-Five Elementary'). One thing for sure...I'll never look at Chinese Handcuffs in the same way.

And why do dogs chase cars? "They can't form a noose without opposable thumbs. They don't know how to turn on the gas in the kitchen. It's impossible for them to slit their wrists. They don't have trigger fingers." But ultimately, maybe it's because, like Mendal, they just want to get out of town.

No, you do not have to be a Southerner to love George Singleton's stories. You just have to appreciate excellent writing and quirky stories. I am not even American. Singleton's stories make me happy because in them I meet Americans that don't fit the mold of the SUV-driving suburbanite, and the stories are a riot.