Whistling Dixie: Dispatches from the South

Reed dissects topics both whimsical and important, from university courses for eliminating one's southern accent, to northerners moving south, to the permutations of barbecue, to race....The South is a funny place, he says, now more than ever.

John Shelton Reed is William Rand Kenan, Jr. Professor Emeritus of sociology at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, where he was director of the Howard Odum Institute for Research in Social Science for twelve years and helped to found the university's Center for the Study of the American South. He grew up in Kingsport, Tennessee, did his undergraduate work at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology,and received his Ph.D. from Columbia University before going to Chapel Hill in 1969. The eighteen books he has written or edited include 1001 Things Everyone Should Know About the South and (most recently) Holy Smoke: The Big Book of North Carolina Barbecue, both written with his wife, Dale Volberg Reed. His articles have appeared in professional and popular periodicals ranging from Science to Southern Living, and he was founding co-editor of the quarterly Southern Cultures.