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Title details for Deep South by Paul Theroux - Available

Deep South

Four Seasons on Back Roads

by Paul Theroux
John McDonough
Audiobook
1 of 1 copy available
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One of the most acclaimed travel writers of our time turns his unflinching eye on an American South too often overlooked Paul Theroux has spent fifty years crossing the globe, adventuring in the exotic, seeking the rich history and folklore of the far away. Now, for the first time, in his tenth travel book, Theroux explores a piece of America - the Deep South. He finds there a paradoxical place, full of incomparable music, unparalleled cuisine, and yet also some of the nation's worst schools, housing, and unemployment rates. It's these parts of the South, so often ignored, that have caught Theroux's keen traveler's eye. On road trips spanning four seasons, wending along rural highways, Theroux visits gun shows and small-town churches, laborers in Arkansas, and parts of Mississippi where they still call the farm up the road "the plantation." He talks to mayors and social workers, writers and reverends, the working poor and farming families - the unsung heroes of the south, the people who, despite it all, never left, and also those who returned home to rebuild a place they could never live without. From the writer whose "great mission has always been to transport us beyond that reading chair, to challenge himself - and thus, to challenge us" (Boston Globe), Deep South is an ode to a region, vivid and haunting, full of life and loss alike.

  • Creators

  • Publisher

  • Release date

    September 29, 2015

  • Formats

    • OverDrive Listen audiobook

      • ISBN: 9781501904813
      • File size: 688479 KB
      • Duration: 23:54:19

  • Languages

    • English

  • Reviews

    • Publisher's Weekly

      Starred review from May 11, 2015
      Travel writer Theroux (Ghost Train to the Eastern Star) finds the traveling easier and his insights more penetrating in this engrossing passage through the South. Celebrating the wonders of American drivingâno more rattle-trap trains or jam-packed busesâthe New England native recounts several road trips from South Carolina through Arkansas, circling back to revisit places and people in a way he couldn't on his treks across foreign continents. His relaxed schedule lets him forget the journey and, instead, immerse himself in destinations that seem both familiar and strange ("Jesus is lordâwe buy and sell guns," reads a billboard). Avoiding tourist traps, Theroux seeks out gun shows, church services, seedy motels, and downscale diners such as Doe's Eat Place, in Greenville, Miss.; he insistently probes the legacy of slavery and Jim Crow, and the appalling poverty of back-road towns abandoned by industry. All this emerges through vivid, novelistic reportage as he gently prods people for their stories, reveling in their musical dialects, mapping the intersections of personal experience and tragic history that give the South "a great overwhelming sadness that couldn't fathom." Free of the sense of alienation that marked his recent travelogues, this luminous sojourn is Theroux's best outing in years. Color photos. Agent: Andrew Wylie, Wylie Agency.

    • AudioFile Magazine
      John McDonough, who's narrated Paul Theroux's work before, brings his gravelly voice and musical ear to this complex and interwoven work of travel narrative. The setting for Theroux's most recent peregrinations is the rural South, and McDonough's challenge is to capture the dialects of the residents of the Black Belt states. He adeptly mimics the long, languid inflections of the locals and does a fine job with the new immigrants from India and Iran, too. This road book with digressions on Southern literature, culture, and the region's unlikely resemblance to a third-world country is presented with art and style. A.M. © AudioFile 2016, Portland, Maine

Formats

  • OverDrive Listen audiobook

subjects

Languages

  • English

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