Lewis Grizzard Books

With a title this funny, how could the rest of the book not be? Lewis Grizzard delivers in this hilarious look at southern life. Lewis at some point touches on everything from dissatisfied transplant yankees (Delta's ready when you are...), boys with earrings (pirates, rock stars, or gay), and marriage (he's had so many wives that he can't remember their names. He calls them all "plaintiff"). This and all of Lewis Grizzard's books should be handed out to any yankee crossing the Mason-Dixon line. I can think of no better primer on proper southern behavior

I was given Gizzard's masterpiece AFTER I had bypass surgery and have shared it with 15 friends who have had heart surgery since mine. But, the timing is important. This is a book not-to-be-read BEFORE you go under the knife; it may cause you to change your mind! But read after the big event, it's hilarious and you must be careful that you don't laugh so hard you pull your staples out. I highly recommend it as a vital recuperative tool.

This is a great book for everyone or anybody who has a love one going to have open heart surgery,or has had. This book opened my eyes to alot of things my mom has went through and going through now after having valve replacement a third time.

Lewis will make you smile, laugh, cry, and everything in between as he weaves another magical story in only the way he can. You'll learn about his growing up to need open heart surgery and how he'll never be able to look at a plate of BBQ the same again!

Lewis Grizzard was, like his friend Weyman C. Wannamaker, a Great American. His writing celebrated his Southern Heritage and is full of stories about faithful dogs, good country music and women who looked so good they'd make a preacher break out in a sweat. He often accompanied his beloved Georgia Bulldog football team, and reporting from New Orleans at the 1980 Sugar Bowl he wrote that he had just experienced a turtle soup that was so good it "couldn't have been any better if you had known the turtle personally." He was to the written word what Jerry Clower was to the spoken, and I don't think it's a coincidence that when Lewis branched off into stand-up comedy in his later years that his style seemed most reminiscent of the Big Man from Mississippi. Lewis loved his momma, loved his country and loved his culture, and he wrote about the things he loved in a way that if you didn't love them too, at least you could understand why he did.

This volume details some of his tribulations related to his eventually fatal coronary disease.

He is missed.

This is a whole hour of looking at a new housing developement and stating it is different than the farm field that used to be here. If you find comfort in being stuck in the past you will love this tape but look for me I the future. Tape was blah but I am a woman and the author does not know what women want.

The first book I have ever read in my 55 years that actually made me laugh out loud while reading. This is the funniest book since the Clinton administration or the Gore/Bush election. Truely hilarious!

Grizzard points out what is wrong with American culture today, and where it started. A good book for anyone with a sense of humor, and a must read for any Good Ol' Southern Boy. Being one myself, I agreed with almost everything he had to say, and found myself rolling with laughter at most of it.

Lewis, may he rest in peace, was the only person from Moreland, Georgia to have books show up on the New York Times Bestseller list. As he said - he was also the only person from Moreland, Georgia who ever HEARD of the New York Times Bestseller list.

He was unashamedly Southern and just as proudly a graduate of the University of Georgia - and he wasn't afraid to bash things non-Southern or even just non-UGA. Today much of his material sounds homophobic, misogynistic, and hateful of Yankees, Doctors and other things outside his sphere. I think from his perspective he would have said that he was only proud of his heritage - although it is the same perspective that makes some Southerners waive their Confederate Flags to celebrate their "heritage" which simultaneously looking to non-Southerners as racist, homophobic, misogynistic, etc.

Wow - I didn't start this review to bash Lewis Grizzard, who I thought was a brilliantly funny man, but I thought it was worth mentioning for folks who might be offended.

His stories on this CD are funny - some of them hilarious. He saves some of his best barbs for himself. He corrects a feminist who thought he was against Women's Liberation: "Au Contraire, Madame, I've given three of them their freedom myself!" On his piece regarding his open heart surgery: "Heart surgery will make you reconsider your position on narcotics!"

So - if you don't mind hearing stories from a distinctly pre-PC Southern perspective, you can't get much funnier than Lewis Grizzard.

A great tribute to the dear late Lewis Grizzard. The best of says it all. a great son of the south.
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Lewis Grizzard's humor has an across-the-board appeal. His style was just fabulous, and this volume, which collects his first five books is a must have for anyone looking to find some humorous writing. I daresay that Grizzard's writing is on-par with, or just as essential to the Southern literary canon as Faulkner, O'Connor, et.al. The only gripe about this collection is the poor editing job. It is chock full of spelling errors, which, I don't know whether or not were extant in the original versions of these texts, but they're only distracting sometimes.

This collection is the entirety of five of Grizzard's first seven written books. The books contained within are:

Kathy Sue Loudermilk, I Love You
Won't You Come Home, Billy Bob Bailey?
Don't Sit Under The Grits Tree With Anybody Else But Me
Elvis Is Dead And I Don't Feel So Good Myself
Shoot Low, Boys, They're Riding Shetland Ponies

This large volume helps you see Grizzard's early works where he is developing his writing style. His first tome is somewhat dry, but the laughs pick up in the second one. By "Grits," Lewis is hitting on all cylinders and he peaks in this particular volume in the "Elvis" book. The "Shetland" book drops off a bit, but the tome is still worth what you pay for it.

The one criticism I have of this work is nobody's fault - it is a DATED work. The articles that are reproduced were all written between 1979 and 1985 and many of them deal with what were current events then that many people on Amazon were not even alive to experience. Also, some of it is based in Georgia including the local political scene that most readers could care less about unless they're reseaching a political science paper about Atlanta politics.

Grizzard deals with the end of the Carter years including his own feelings of reluctantly becoming a Reaganite (the evolution took awhile, but Grizzard when from liberal to conservative over a ten year period). One of the most hilarious articles is a letter Grizzard publicly wrote to Reagan after John Hinckley shot the President. Grizzard caps this one off with, "And you're a year older than Arizona."

This is also good if you're doing a research project on Grizzard himself because you see the change in style.

I heartily endorse this book.

I was first introduced to the musings of the late, great Lewis Grizzard in 1988, when I was a freshman at college. I noticed even my Dad would split his sides reading Grizzard's latest commentary, so I became a fan. Then my best friend was given one of his comedy tapes, and I was hooked.

So in the summer of 1993, I moved to Little Rock, and while waiting for cable to be installed, I needed a hobby. Reading books from the base library sounded good to me, so I picked up and ran through several of Grizzard's tomes while my wife enjoyed her new favorite author, John Grisham.

I liked all of the other books, but the first time I read this one, I really hated it. It didn't seem funny, the type was small, and it seemed a third-person biography that nobody could care about other than Grizzard himself. I liked the beginning, but it didn't do much for me.

It all changed when I read the final chapters and the sad saga of Lewis versus Lacey J. Banks, a sportswriter for the Chicago Sun-Times who also happened to be black and whom Grizzard suspended for insubordination when he was the sports editor. The story was tragic, something even Grizzard acknowledged in the years he had matured, and he even took the blame for some of what happened.

Yet if you've read Grizzard's books - as opposed to some of the later ones where they just put out a bunch of his columns - you notice that he references things he discussed earlier in the book. So when the Banks case told of an earlier court appearance, I realized I had to go back and read the entire thing to understand what Grizzard was saying.

I did, and I laughed out loud hysterical a number of times.

I wanted to be a journalist when I was in high school, but a talent show victory in music and a momentary lapse of reason (with apologies to Pink Floyd) put me in the Music department. Grizzard told stories of the strange people who work - or more precisely used to work - in newspaper publishing houses.

The book, originally released in 1990, is somewhat dated. Lewis died before the Internet made every half-baked nitwit with a computer a political advisor, and I wonder how he would have adjusted. But the story had a lot of laughs, regrets, tears (particularly over his divorces), and a touching end.

Perhaps I perceive it different than other readers. In 1975, I moved to England with my family for three years. When we returned in 1978, we arrived in Atlanta, Georgia just as the sun was going down. Grizzard wrote about being rehired at the Atlanta Journal-Constitution by Jim Minter, the guy who had originally hired him in 1968 upon his graduation from Georgia. It was freedom and a return to the South for a man who had spent three winters in Chicago and bailed out in the spring of the same year I returned, 1978. Thus, the book spoke to me on a different level than most people because I appreciated what it was like to return back home to the native South.

Grizzard did, in many ways, lead a charmed life that he probably didn't appreciate until this book (as the book makes clear). He had a faulty heart valve problem, discussed in many of his books, that kept him out of the social experiment of his youth, the Vietnam War. He got a big break when Ed Thelenius, the sports announcer for Bulldog Football, offered him a job as a spotter his freshman year. And he was in Atlanta when Hank Aaron thumped home run number 715, a story told in this book about how he put together the paper that evening and worked 23 straight hours with a first-day intern.

The problem with the book is this: unless you already adore Grizzard, you are not going to like it. It's just that simple. It is actually a well-written chronology, complete with his smart aleck remarks and comebacks as well as his self-deprecating humor. But it is a major drawback: unless you are already familiar with a few of the stories, it is simply not going to be a good read.

For Lewis Grizzard fans only.

The titles of Grizzard's books are the most funny part of them. He talks in this book how he always concentrated on having a zippy title for his content so that the reader would want to read on. This book is his life story in the newspapers and when he was growing up. I get the impression he is a anti-intellectual common man who loved his sports, tabloid people stories, pretty ladies, beer, cigarettes, and the Elvis diet. And he especially loved newspapers. His story is not all comedy and he has many stories of his news buddies dying an untimely death. I will say that's probably due to the long hours, low pay, divorces, newsroom stress, beer, cigarettes, traditional southern diet, and lack of sleep. But no matter, these quirky characters loved the newspapers also, so they lived a good short life.

Grizzard even went up north to Chicago in a management position for one of its papers. It was folly though. He should have remembered that southerners don't like the north and vice-versa. He didn't like the two seasons of weather, "winter and the fourth of July", as he puts it. And he couldn't get any grits or pork barbeque. He alsos had trouble with an affirmative action hire that played the race card when he got fired for being a terrible writer and columnist who wouldn't listen to advice. There was a lawsuit and Grizzard was tarred as a racist from the south. The plaintiff won and was back in the newsroom again, although Grizzard appears to be a fair-minded, but naïve man who just wants a quality paper put out. He does make a lot of sarcastic comments about political correctness. Ironically, it was political correctness that helped win the suit against him.

Grizzard enjoyed the first part of his career most when he worked for a new newspaper that was competing with a really bad local one in Athens, Georgia. He liked the competition of getting a scoop before the other paper did and the tabloid people stories, such as a woman getting her pet chicken stuck up in a tree. Grizzard loved the local news and didn't really care about "riots in South Yemen", as he put it. He also did a story on a police chief who threaten him with violence when he asked him about speed traps in a small community. The extent of the story was that one question and reaction, but it got the chief fired--mission accomplished. To be a good newsman, it helps if you like making a nuisance of yourself.

But that paper got bought out by the rival, and it was on to the Atlanta Journal and then the Constitution. He met one of his heroes and then after getting to know him, found out that he was the tyrant of news room, always ready to blame others for supposed mistakes in the sports section. Grizzard also had trouble with the printer's union that often gave some workers an uncooperative attitude towards getting things done before the dead line. He even had someone called the Reverend, a printer who started speaking in tongues right before a deadline. This event made the paper go over the deadline. One guy died in the ever stressful printing/composing room where everyone is screaming at each other to get the paper out on time. They put his obit in second edition and carried on. After reading through it, I thought that a normal person would be disappointed about being a journalist, but no matter to Grizzard, he still loved newspapers.

This is a good book for finding out how journalism worked during the sixties and seventies. It's got some chuckles throughout, although nothing as roll-on-the-floor funny as "The Dog that Bit People" by James Thurber or as good a style as Class by Paul Fussell, those other famous satirists. Grizzard seems to make some errors in logic in the book; must have been the beer.

This book was spectacular. Not only did you get to see how he adjusted from college to the workforce in journalism, but you also got to see some of the shortcomings in his life. I read this book while I was in high school and it was one of the things that prompted me to study communications in college. Thanks for the encouragement, Lewis. Rest in peace.

I love Lewis Grizzard's humor, but most of the time, I found him more heartwarming when he wasn't trying to be funny. That is why I have read this book many more times than any other Grizzard novel. Don't overlook this jem just because it wasn't labeled as funny as say 'Elvis is dead...'.
This book is all about the newspaper trade. It tells us of Lewis growing up trying to break into the newspaper game, all the way to his life as a humorist weekly writer in Georgia. It's a quick, funny, informative book I have re-read many times.
I go back and forth on which is a better book about growing up in the news business, this one or Charles Kuralt's book 'A life on the road'.

IMO, this is one of Lewis's best works. It is not a collection of columns as many of his books were, but an autobiographical account of his career as a journalist, spanning from his days at the University of Georgia and working for the Athens newspaper to his brief career in Chicago to his eventual, grateful return to Atlanta.

Inspiring, thoughtful, and downright funny at the same time (the scene with one of Lewis's editors planning coverage of the Second Coming is a riot), If I Ever Get Back to Georgia would make a great gift for any college student aspiring to break into newspapers. What better way to be inspired than to read one of the great Southern humorists!

Complaining that Lewis Grizzard's writing lacks a plot is like complaining that Beethoven or Merle Haggard's music isn't good to dance to. Lewis Grizzard was a columnist and he didn't write "stories" with "plots". He wrote essays full of perceptive and funny insight into what makes people tick, or at least amusement that he didn't understand certain things, such as Dr. Ruth's status as a sex expert. (Now, be honest.... how many saw Dr. Ruth for the first time and thought "SHE's a sex expert"?)

I don't know about the rest of the world, but Georgia misses Lewis Grizzard.

Stupid humor,no plot ,and extremely boring!!!! 1 star. This book was utterly disappointing.

This book, like all of Lewis Grizzard's books, is absolutely full of humor. Even though he's been dead for several years, I still miss his columns and books.

Lewis was one of the funniest authors that ever wrote on southern traditions.

In "Don't bend Over in the Garden Granny, You know them Taters Got Eyes" Lewis takes a look at . . . well . . . sex. From poking fun at how the accent of Dr. Ruth could seriously hurt someone and other hilarious subjects that will keep you laughing for days.

I wouldnt recommend this book to anybody with even the slightest bit of an open mind. This book is definitely not for you. However, if your an ultra-conservitive, narrow-minded, hypocritical, arrogant jackass, then its right up your alley! As for Lewis Grizzard, he should stick to writing letters to the editor of small town insignificant newspapers. Im sure more people will see those than will ever read this book!

The man who said this was whine'n outloud, never understood Gizzard and never will. This book is one of his best works. The style in which he roles off his stories, each with their own twisted view is unique only to Gizzard. I highly recommend this book.

This is my favorite. Grizzard is closer to my parents generation than mine, but I can relate to this book. I especially love his commentary on country music. I'm sad to see that this book is out of print, but I would highly recommend it to everyone. Another Grizzard book that every fan should read is "My Papa Was a Pistol and I'm a Son of a Gun." It is a very touching story of Grizzard's father written with great love and understanding. It would probably suprise some people that Grizzard can write with such feeling.

For some reason this book's subtitle isn't included here at Amazon: "Elvis is Dead, and I don't Feel So Good Myself". Like many southerners of his generation, Lewis Grizzard grew up as a democrat, surrounded by democrats. Why? Well because Abraham Lincoln had been a Republican, of course, and there are still Southerners who are sore about the Civil War, but they're generally the kind of people who are sore about most things. Grizzard's fellow southerners were mostly bible-thumping conservatives and this book examines changes that began to occur in Grizzard's thinking - such as the realization that his political ideology was REALLY more in concert with the Republicans. Similarly, he had grown up in the 50s and 60s thinking that he was a rock and roll rebel and relishing the rhythms of Elvis and Carl Perkins - but as he grew up he recognized that his musical tastes were now more along the lines of Willie Nelson and Merle Haggard than what was passing for "rock and roll" 15 years ago.

Lewis doesn't apologize for his views - and in America he shouldn't have to - and if his opinions offend you I'm sorry someone held a gun to your head and made you read his book! But if you can get over any eagerness to be offended I think you'll find Lewis Grizzard an observant and funny chronicler of the human condition.

This book is about Lewis Grizzard's life and how he wished he could call his mother. In his childhood, he loved his mom, but after growing up, he learned just how much she instilled in his life. He married three times and died divorced.

One of his problems is that he wanted all of his problems is that he wanted all of his wives to be just like his mother, even in their cooking. He was too picky and did not seem to care much about his relationship with his wives. He never put much into it.

Very Good Book!

I would suggest reading some of his other books (which are actually collections of his columns) first. Get to know the author - then, read this touching book.

"Don't Forget to Call Your Mama I Wish I Could Call Mine" is more serious than the typical Grizzard book. But is a wonderful book for his fans as it gives us a very personal look at his early years. We can see how his sense of humor was developed as a way of dealing with rough times.

By the way .... it is very important that all Lewis Grizzard books are read with a sourthern-drawl, they are even funnier that way! :)

This book was a gift, I have not read it. The person receiving the book enjoyed it very much.

The book was all I expected and the delivery time was great. I am pretty much house bound so I really appreciate Amazon