Noodling for Flatheads: Moonshine, Monster Catfish and Other Southern Comforts

by Burkhard Bilger

Book Overview

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... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0684850109
• ISBN13: 9780684850108
• Release Date: September 2000
• Publisher: Scribner Book Company
• Length: 253 Pages
• Weight: 0.95 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.2" x 5.9" x 8.8"

Customer Reviews

Unfortunately Overlooked

I recently found myself recommending this book yet again and I realized that far too few people had commented on it. I used to work at a magazine that had published two excerpts from this book and I was priviliged to help edit Bilger's work for publication. Bottom line is that this book is sorely overlooked, despite Bilger's New Yorker affiliation and the various "best of" anthologies that many of these pieces appeared in. Bilger may be the best science writer working today - but that seems like an unfair qualification. He's just flat out an excellent journalist and writer, as evidenced by his keen observation and predisposition to rewarding literary style arcs in journalism. When Tom wolfe first coined the term 'New Journalism' I'm pretty sure this is exactly what he had in mind. In addition to the immense pleasures of the writing itself, in the end you actually learn something. I sincerely hope more people read this book and I continue to scour the New Yorker table of contents for his work.

Turn off your tv -- there's an amazing country out there

This is storytelling at its best. I first read one of the essays in this book in the New Yorker and right away I knew I'd be looking to read everything that Burkhard Bilger writes. This book contains eight essays but I think of them more as real-life stories. In the table of contents each essay title has a subtitle. Even they are a pleasure to read, each one beginning with the words "In which". To give you an idea of what I mean, here's the subtitle for the essay on moonshining: "In which the age of the microbrewery meets the modern police state, with intoxicating results".In the introduction the author tells us how he started writing these tales about the South. He was living in Massachusetts and decided he wanted to get a coonhound which he knew, and missed, from growing up in Oklahoma. But finding a coonhound in New England wasn't easy. He says "A few people had heard rumors of such dogs, but none had actually seen one in the flesh." He ended up at the home of a breeder who handed him a magazine "American Cooner". The author said "It was the strangest publication I had ever seen." And so began his journey in search of life outside the popular culture which is all most of us know, beyond the "range of most antennas". Each of the essays is about a tradition, or sport, or way of life that is in danger of dying out, some of them illegal, some not. He visits a woman in Oklahoma who breeds coonhounds and hunts racoons more than 340 nights a year, a man in Kentucky who hunts and eats squirrels, and a man in Georgia who owns a fish hatchery, frog farm, and wild hog preserve. Each of these stories is, in the end, about people and this is where Bilger's writing really shines. He knows how to write about people better than almost anyone else I've read. I read alot of non-fiction and profiles of people and I know it's not easy to write about people in a way that gives the reader the sense that they now know that person, at least a little. The writer spends a few days with someone, hangs out with them, talks to them for hours. Then he has to sit down and from all those hours pick just the right details, just the right quotes, just the right observations, to make that person seem real on the page. And Bilger has mastered that art. Beyond the people, he also puts the stories into a larger, sometimes historical, context. In the story on cockfighting he goes to Louisiana where some people are reluctant to talk to him even though it's one of the few states where the sport is still legal. He tells about the popularity of the sport in different parts of the world and in the early history of America, when it was not only legal but a "fashionable amusement". In fact it didn't begin to be banned until the 19th century, and New York in 1867 "became the first city to ban all blood sports." The author talks about the efforts to outlaw the sport in the few states that still allow it, and he does mention animal rights activists but he doesn't interview any. He doesn't se

Yikes? Who knew?

Most of us who live outside the South have adopted the "New South" image, consisting of budding high-tech nodes, car plants in South Carolina, and, of course, the Atlanta Olympics. Bilger shows that unique southern traditions, including those squirrel brains, are still around and thriving. He is not judgemental (although he doesn't seem too anxious to relocate), but rather paints a detailed and sympathetic portrait of a unique and still vibrant rural southern culture.

Noodle away

Bilger calls himself a gonzo journalist, and it may take just that type of writer from the fringes to head out in search of folks who eat squirrel brains or play rolley hole (a marbles game). Yet he proves greatly sympathetic to his subjects (more so than gonzo god Hunter S. Thompson, for example). In the hands of a Faulkner or a Flannery O'Connor, the tales of bullfrog farmers and coon hunters might have become Southern gothic grotesqueries. But Bilger paints them in vividly human colors in ways that might even make you want to go noodling for flatheads (a most unique method of catching catfish). This is a fun look at the lives of people we rarely encounter.