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Rating: 
Summary: good writing...but
Review: Blount is a good writer and has an excellent sense of phrasing. Many of these essays are insightful and quiet funny but overall this memoir really needs some editing. It is too long and rambling and he continually looses sight of his own theme. The best essays aren't even about his past but his current situation as a "humorist." His travels to China and stints on talk shows are the best.
Rating: 
Summary: A not very funny humorist!
Review: Having roared at Roy Blount's humor on the Garrison Keillor show, I really looked forward to reading his book making fun of the mother-son relationship so aptly caught up in the title, "Be Sweet". I was terribly disappointed and found him not only lacking in humor but exhibiting a real dislike for females altogether. It was a book I easily gave away to the second hand shop.
Rating: 
Summary: bitter with the sweet
Review: I was lucky enough to stumble across Roy Blount reading from this book in a Vermont bookstore. I bought it on the spot, telling him that it was the first one of his books that I had paid full price for. He thought this was pretty fun, the store employee sitting next to him didn't. This book is worth its full price.Be Sweet in no way sets out to "make fun of the mother-son relationship". I suppose because Blount is such an irreverent goof-ball on the radio and in print, it seems fair to have that preconception. However, Blount has always let us know that some things are sacred and after you get a short way into this book you realize that family is one of them. He desperately does not want to cast aspersions on his own mother's character, but he has to acknowledge that she did drive him to distraction throughout his life. There were several points in this book were Blount seems to be going off on a tangent. To be honest I began to wonder if he was just filling the space between the covers. Oh me of little faith! In the last third of the book I was progressively more amazed and impressed as I discovered that his seemingly unconnected threads were actually germane to the resolution of his mid-life psychic wrestling match with himself. Bill Bryson's recent A Walk In the Woods similarly surprised me. I don't expect journalists to write deeply personal prose. Roy Blount beats Bryson hands down as far as the psychological depths that are plumbed and illuminated. If the presentation of the psychological dimension of things bores you or insults your sense of decorum, then don't read this Roy Blount book. If you want to know what is going on in the head of middle aged white Southern guys of above average emotional honesty, then this is a pretty good place to start.
Rating:
Summary: Interesting mother -son history
Review: Roy Blount Jr. writes a rambling account of growing up with his strong yet troubled mother -- a woman who despite an abusive upbringing herself managed to raise a son and a daughter with little help from a good but passive husband to be individuals with a strong sense of themselves. Blount is funny and he makes good points about the defensive nature of humor, the lurking self-loathing beneath the humorist. The only turnoff in this saga is that as a middle-aged man, Blount still is in rebellion against his mother for her guilt trips, so much so that he can't, it seems, "be sweet" to the women in his personal life whom he claims he has loved. Otherwise a good read for anyone intersted in family relationships and 1950s nostalgia.
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