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My mother loved me to pieces, as she often said, writes Roy Blount
Jr., "and I'm still trying to pick up the pieces." In the book his
readers have been waiting for, our generation's master of
full-hearted humor lays open the soul of his life story.
Blount--Georgia boy, New York wit, lover of baseball and
interesting women, bumbling adventurer, salty-limerick virtuoso,
and impassioned father--journeys into his past, and his psyche (and
also to China, Manhattan, and sixty feet underwater) in search of
the answers to three riddles that have haunted his life: one, the
riddle of "the family curse"; two, the riddle of what drives him,
or anyone, to be funny; and three, the riddle of what so cruelly
tangled his bond to the beguiling orphan girl who became the
impossible mother who raised him to Be Sweet. Sardonic and
sentimental, hilarious and grieving, brazen and bashful, tough and
tender, honest and wayward, Be Sweet resonates with the complex but
bouncy chords of a whole man singing, clinkers and all.
In this appealing collection of fourteen interrelated stories,
twelve-year-old William Stroup recounts the ludicrous predicaments
and often self-imposed hardships his family endures. Playing on the
tension between Martha, his hardworking, sensible mother, and
Morris, his disarmingly likable but shiftless and philandering
father, William tells of Pa's flirtation with a widow, his swapping
match with a band of gypsies, his battle of wits with a traveling
silk-tie saleswoman, and his get-rich-quick schemes based on
selling Ma's old love letters and collecting scrap iron. Often
caught in the middle of the Stroups' bungles is Handsome Brown,
their yard hand, as well as a number of animals with all-too-human
qualities: Ida, the mule; Pretty Sooky, the runaway calf; College
Boy, the fighting cock; a small flock of woodpeckers that favor
Handsome's head over a tree; and goats who commandeer the roof of
the Stroups' house. Georgia Boy was a special book to Caldwell, and
its humor is less in the service of social criticism than in other
works in which he dealt with poor white southerners. Beneath
Georgia Boy's folksy lightheartedness, however, lie the problems of
indigence, racism, and apathy that Caldwell confronted again and
again in his fiction.
Thirtieth Anniversary Edition Any number of writers could spend an
entire season with an NFL team, from the first day of training camp
until the last pick of the draft, and come up with an interesting
book. But only Roy Blount Jr. could capture the pain, the joy, the
fears, the humor—in short, the heart—of a championship team. In
1973, the Pittsburgh Steelers were super, but missed the bowl.
Blount’s portrait of a team poised to dominate the NFL for more
than a decade recounts the gridiron accomplishments and
off-the-field lives of players, coaches, wives, fans, and owners.
About Three Bricks Shy . . . is considered a classic; Sports
Illustrated recently named it one of the Top 100 Sports Books of
All Time. This thirtieth-anniversary edition includes additional
chapters on the Steelers’ Super Bowl wins, written for the 1989
paperback, as well as a new introduction by the author.
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