July 20, 2020
Despite a generous helping of folksy wit and charm, this compilation of previously published columns from Pulitzer winner Bragg (The Best Cook in the World) amounts to a frustratingly shallow tribute to the South. There are laugh-out-loud moments throughout, as Bragg recounts close encounters with such perils as spicy fried chicken in Nashville, alligators in Florida’s Lake Okeechobee, and a particularly ill-tempered goat. However, Bragg’s jabs at contemporary culture, as a self-described “crotchety relic,” wear thin as the book proceeds. “New country,” he writes, “is as country as a black turtleneck, all hat and no cow,” the phrase for somebody deemed insufficiently rural to don a cowboy hat. Bragg grouses that too many Southerners “anchor themselves with clichés,” but the whole book is a paean to Southern clichés. More damagingly, Bragg makes a half-hearted attempt to account for the hate on display at the 2017 Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Va.: “I hear that many of the people who marched in Charlottesville were Southern men, but I didn’t know them.” Bragg’s longtime fans will enjoy the piquant one-liners they’ve come to expect, but new readers looking for meaningful insight into the South should look to his previous works.