Long Time Leaving, Roy Blount, Jr.
Long Time Leaving, Roy Blount, Jr.
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Long Time Leaving
Dispatches From Up South

Author: Roy Blount, Jr.

Narrator: Roy Blount

Abridged: 7 hr 58 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Published: 05/01/2007

Categories: Nonfiction, Humor


Synopsis

The first collection of the beloved humorist's sly, dry, hilarious essays in more than a decade focuses on a perennially popular topic: the South vs. the North.

"When [Northerners] ask me to explain grits, I look at them like an Irishman who's been asked to explain potatoes."

"When I was a boy in Georgia, college sports was Bobby Dodd versus Bear Bryant immemorial. Compared to that the Harvard-Yale game is a panel discussion."

"Anybody who claims . . . not to have 'a racist bone' in his or her body is at best preracist and has a longer way to go than the rest of us."

Hard-working humorist Roy Blount Jr. lives in the North but he's from the South, a delicious tension that has always informed and shaped his work. In this new collection, he directs his acerbic wit and finely-tuned insight toward the persistent and colorful differences between the two.

His essays treat every conceivable topic on which North and South misunderstand each other, from music to sports, eating, education, politics, child-rearing, religion, race, and language ("remember when there was lots of discussion of 'ebonics'?").

In this eminently quotable collection, Blount does justice to the charming, funny, infuriating facets of Southern tradition and their equally odd Northern counterpoints.

Reviews

Goodreads review by Charles on December 07, 2009

The temptation in writing about someone as witty as Roy Blount Jr. is just to rear back and quote. So let’s put temptation before us, with a sample of what’s to be found in his latest book, “Long Time Leaving”: • On Truman Capote: “his writing did over time tend to break up in the opposite but compl......more

Goodreads review by Dale on January 01, 2016

I've read essays of Blount Jr. before and enjoy hearing him on "Wait, wait...Don't Tell Me," and I thought I would enjoy this book much more than I did. He is very effective at explaining some of the nuances of southern food, speech, reading, music, etc. and even more effective at explaining why som......more

Goodreads review by Denny on January 05, 2016

Long Time Leaving didn't keep me in nonstop stitches, but when the anecdotes weren't laugh-out-loud funny, they were always interesting, touching, or poignant, and the audiobook as a whole made my lengthy daily commute enjoyable. As a born Southerner who has long lived in the northeast, Blount has a......more

Goodreads review by Haley on August 13, 2007

Pretty funny in a my-dad-would-love-this kind of way, which was great because my dad's a pretty funny, insightful guy. As a transplant to the Northeast myself, I appreciated his insistence on the complexities origin and identity, never being fully comfortable with the label "Southern writer."......more

Goodreads review by Kati on January 10, 2010

Not Blount's best book, but hell, his mediocre writing is better than many other people's best work.......more