Stuff
Product Details
Scribner, May 2002
Trade Paperback, 256 pages
ISBN-10: 0684850117
ISBN-13: 9780684850115
Description
Burkhard Bilger vividly captures a world that lies outside the familiar images of life in the United States in the twenty-first century in eight superbly crafted essays about little-known corners of the South. It is a world in which grown men catch catfish with their bare hands, crowds of people cheer on chickens as they fight to the death, and a woman moves into a trailer home when her house burns down just so she can continue hunting 350 nights a year. Bilger records the eccentric and sometimes downright bizarre behavior he encounters with humor and wit but nary a whisper of mockery. In essays that combine history, anecdotes, and personal observations, he describes each activity, its origins, its dangers, and its pleasures. But Noodling for Flatheads is much more than a survey of unlikely pastimes. Through lively portraits of the participants, Bilger illuminates the obsessive individualism that is at the heart of the American spirit.
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Table of ContentsMalcolm Gladwell author of The Tipping Point Burkhard Bilger has done for the South what Joseph Mitchell did for New York City. He has taken a seemingly familiar world and exposed its strange and bizarre and poignant soul.
David Quammen, author of The Song of the Dodo and The Boilerplate Rhino Go out to the semi-lunatic fringe of any society, and you'll find charmingly aberrant folks whose weird tastes, notions, and practices tell you something, yes indeed, about values and origins back at the center. Burkhard Bilger knows that, and puts the knowledge to good use in this graceful, entertaining book.
Gordon Grice, author of The Red Hourglass Noodling for Flatheads is terrific. Bilger's style is accessible and somehow unobtrusive even when he's delivering a knock-out bit of description, a feat he manages every five pages or so. I love the intelligence of these essays. They start in the quirkiest places and end up deep in the human heart. Just wonderful writing.
John Seabrook author of Nobrow Leaving the Cineplex and The Gap far behind him, Burkhard Bilger goes searching for authentic American folk traditions, and finds among the cockfighters and squirrel eaters the kind of literary journalism not seen in these parts since John McPhee's travels in Georgia. A wonderful debut.
Caroline FraserOutsideA fascinating look into rural America's intimate, uneasy relationship with the animal life that surrounds it
-- both wild and domesticated.
