The Redneck Way of Knowledge
People:
“Wonderful … a lot of hard drinking, vivid insights, and belly laughs.”
Philadelphia Inquirer:
“Marvelous … Boyd resembles a cross between Joan Didion and Hunter Thompson, [but] her original voice makes these tales her own.”
The Nation:
“Impressive … superb … Boyd writes brilliantly. [The Redneck Way of Knowledge is] the best kind of social criticism.”
About the Book
This intoxicating book by the author of The Revolution of Little Girls combines autobiography, reporting, and the dressed-up lies we call fiction. An underground classic since its initial publication, it is the wildly funny personal testament of Blanche McCrary Boyd, sixties radical and born-again Southerner, a lesbian with an un-PC passion for skydiving and stock-car racing, a graduate of Esalen and kundalini yoga who now takes her altered states “raw, like oysters.”
The Redneck Way of Knowledge is about family reunions and kamikaze love affairs. It is about crashing an arts festival with two precociously decayed Charleston aristocrats and watching the Pope deliver Communion at Yankee Stadium. It is about the selves we try on and slough off on the way to becoming who we are. Throughout, Blanche McCrary Boyd travels the expressway between the realm of the senses and the state of grace, and reports on the journey in prose that combines riotous humor, diamond-hard intelligence, and savage lyricism.
– IndieBound