Moonshine, Monster Catfish and Other Southern Comforts

Burkhard Bilger's beauifully written, wonderfully funny and movingly nostalgic books explore the surviving (and often dying) folk traditions of the American South, from the eating of squirrel brains in Kentucky, cock-fighting in Oklahoma, frog ranching in Georgia and coon hunting all over, to the noodling for flatheads (fishing for catfish, using your fingers as bait and your arm as a hook) of the title. Caught between the possibility of survival through commercialisation or gradual decline (or in the case of squirrel brain eating, threatened by fears of Mad Squirrel Disease), and many of these activities will be lucky to survive far into the new century. Burkhard Bilgers book is a wonderful elegy, hilarious, fascinating and touching, to a threatened tradition of American eccentricity and independence, but it is also a celebration of the survival of local folk culture in the era of the global triumph of Nike, Barbie and Coca Cola, a survival that persists in America's own back yard.