Save Room for Pie

January 25, 2016
While the topic of food has frequently crept into the works of prolific writer and humorist Blount (Alphabetter Juice), this latest marks the first time he’s fully sunk his teeth into the subject, offering course after course of essays, poems, and songs about all things edible. Culled from segments on NPR’s “Wait, Wait, Don’t Tell Me” and fragments from his column in Garden and Gun magazine, along with whatever has captured his interest, the book consists of (and is best read in) small, manageable chunks covering everything from Southern hospitality (in which he defends the polarizing vegetable okra) to the proper appreciation of a good steak (“eating a steak should be like wrestling a worthy opponent”), and the nobility of a cork’s presence in a whisky bottle. Eminently quotable, informative, and entertaining, Blount makes for a genial host, regaling the reader with story after story. Agent: Esther Newberg, ICM.

February 1, 2016
Humorist Blount (Alphabetter Juice: Or, the Joy of Text, 2011, etc.) serves up helpings of praise to food in a collection of yarns and poems. There's not much point to the author's celebration. But then, there's not much point to Blount's style of homespun storytelling; the pleasure is in the telling and in the hearing or reading and not so much in the payoff. The only thing the present book proves "is that food gets into nearly everything [he] write[s]." Blount means that figuratively, of course, for the prime operating principle is never to let the opportunity for a groaner to go by without providing it. There are lots of bad jokes--perhaps the worst involving an exchange between a watermelon and a fruitcake--and lots of worse poetry ("Put a little dough on your hook and throw it out thayor / And pop you got a fish that cooked'll be fit for a mayor"). But there's also lots of well-formed, thoughtful reminiscence about the food of yore against the foodie-ism of today, as well as some of the constants that join the two eras--e.g., the chili dog: "these are neat chili dogs, even when you add the chopped onions, which are handed to you wrapped up in waxed paper so you can add as many of them as you like." Blount has fun twitting regional preferences in food, too, as when he happily exposes the fact that, like so many Yankees, "Stephen King is horrified by okra." As scary things go, okra is a good one, but then so is scrapple--and not everyone appreciates a good possum-cooking competition, which Blount describes from a judge's point of view. Or perhaps a philosopher's: "I don't want to sound like a skittish person," he writes, "but sometimes a situation strikes me as just slightly unsteady enough that I begin to anticipate an ontological shift." More souffle than pie at times but good fun.

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March 15, 2016

Blount has written 24 books, including Alphabet Juice, and appears regularly on National Public Radio's "Wait Wait...Don't Tell Me!" A self-described "lifelong eater," he has penned many articles and the occasional poem or limerick on and about food, which make up this book. Organized much like a cookbook--essentials, meat, plants, drink--this volume includes planning, shopping, and preparation in the form of "ruminations." Family stories, accounts from Blount's marriage, and occasional name-dropping of famous friends can be found in many of the vignettes, first published in magazine form and brought together to create this collection. VERDICT With a conversational tone and brief pieces that create a lighthearted read, Blount's book will appeal to fans of his previous works.--Pam Kingsbury, Univ. of North Alabama, Florence

Copyright 2016 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

Starred review from March 1, 2016
Fans of National Public Radio already know Blount to be utterly delicious from his presence on Wait, Wait . . . Don't Tell Me. The implausibly plausible fake news items that he challenges listeners to distinguish from true stories appear here and there among the short pieces comprising the text. Pithy and cleverly entertaining bits of doggerel verse, not all of them G-rated, add to the book's general hilarity. Blount revels in unabashed omnivorism, and his passion for meat exposes itself in musings on chicken gizzards and on his beloved steaks. Blount's southern upbringing takes center stage as he smacks his lips and his prose while he savors the infinite joys of fried chicken, and he confesses with only a touch of embarrassment that his favorite parts are the tiny, tasty morsels that he noisily sucks from between those usually-discarded rib bones. Foodies will find much here to quote at their next dinner party.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2016, American Library Association.)