Rating: 
Summary: Wacky, hilarious, outrageous ...
Review: ...but there's a solid message buried not too deeply in this book. In part it's another southern coming-of-age tale, but it's somehow greater than the sum of its parts. Terrific story telling and utterly outrageous scenes. The thought that even a little bit of this is probably based on something that really happened is too delicious to contemplate.
Read it and laugh - and then think about it a little more seriously.
Rating: 
Summary: Skip the Movie -- Read the Book!
Review: A reviewer cited on the back cover of this novel calls it "a combination of Thelma and Louise and To Kill a Mockingbird, and that's about right. Beginning in 1965 in the tiny town of Pigeon Creek, Alabama, a single explosive event scatters the characters and sends the story in two directions at once. Twelve-year-old Peejoe (short for Peter Joseph) and his brother are sent to live with their Uncle Dove, a mortician in nearby Industry, while their Aunt Lucille takes off for Hollywood, chasing her dream of landing a starring role on "The Beverly Hillbillies". While Peejoe witnesses both sides of the civil rights movement, right in his own backyard, Lucille seeks the freedom she never had as a frustrated housewife. As the two stories alternately diverge and intertwine, often hilariously, Childress still manages to present an important social commentary.
Rating:
Summary: Good Book
Review: I think the book crazy in alabama was a really interesting and easy to read book. This book held my interest and im not a real heavy reader. I liked the part where Peejoes aunt cut off her husbands head and put it in a tupperware container. I also liked the adventures that peejoe and that aunt lucille went on during the book. This book was very descriptive and had very good detail.
I liked this book alot and i would recommend it to anyone who likes descriptive writing and really good detail. That is my look on the book and i will be looking forward to reading all of the other reviews for this book.
Rating:
Summary: Buy the book
Review: If you like to romp in the park, or people watch at the mall, then you will like this book. If you like to chuckle once in awhile or even laugh out loud, then you will like this book. This novel is about a young boy and his family including a crazy aunt in Alabama by the name of Lucille. There is a serious part regarding race relations, however, the highlights of the story involve Lucille and her antics.
Rating:
Summary: Buy the book
Review: Loved the book. Did NOT like the movie at all. Don't even bother with it.The novel is well-written and full of memorable characters, somewhat like Flagg's FRIED GREEN TOMATOES or FORREST GUMP. CRAZY IN ALABAMA is another in a long line of great southern reads and should be added to everyone's list. Also highly recommend Jackson McCrae's BARK OF THE DOGWOOD--another great book about the south.
Rating:
Summary: Don't Miss this One -- It's Terrific
Review: Mark has a talent for writing prose that is simultaneoulsy thought-provoking and hysterically funny; his world is both authentic and bizzare. He is a master at capturing the experience of youth -- the combination of innocence and growing awareness that we all experienced in some form or another, and his narrative voice is so strong that you'll easily go along for the ride, forgetting you're laughing because one of the women carries around her husband's head in tupperware, or that the people you care about so much are only fabricated characters in a book. This is a highly enjoyable novel that weaves together the story of a woman chasing her dream of stardom with the story of a young boy growing up in the South during the height of the Civil Rights struggle. Besides being a great read, it raises thought provoking questions about how we have treated and continue to treat each other.
Rating: 
Summary: Silly, Irrelevant
Review: The civil rights movement which took place in the U. S. in the sixties was an extremely important era, and deserving of the massive number of historical and artistic interpretations it has received. Here is yet another novel with this period as its backdrop. It would be difficult to find another one with this subject matter that is more trivial and inconsequential. The novel consists of two concurrent stories. The first is written in the first person by Peejoe, an eleven year-old white orphan who lives, primarily, in Industry, Alabama, with first his grandmother, and then his uncle, the local undertaker. It takes place in 1965. The second is a third person narrative, and has to do with his aunt, Lucille. She is a 33 year-old woman with six children. In order to start a new life, she murders her husband and brings his decapitated head over to grandmaw's to show everybody. She then drags it around with her as she goes to New Orleans where she robs a bar, Las Vegas where she wins about thirty thousand dollars, and Los Angeles where she gets a part on the Beverly Hillbillies television program. In between she has wonderful sex with hunky bellboys and other oddballs. In the meantime, poor ol' Peejoe is witnessing some rough times in Industry. See, the rednecks first kill a young black man. Then, during a demonstration over a segregated swimming pool, they kill his brother. Soon, a lot of other black men and women are killed or beaten, and a lot of buildings are firebombed. This goes on with the sheriff's tacit if not outright approval. Hold your breath; I know this is hard to believe, but the sheriff is a racist and has a big beer belly. Peejoe, despite being only eleven years old, and a product of this place and these people, is nevertheless a model of sensitive and correct political thought, and is outraged by all of these events. He publicly sides with the black demonstrators. Like Bill Clinton's story about riding in the back of the bus to show his support for Rosa Parks, it is not terribly believable. But on the other hand, nothing else is either. Of course, the Lucille story was probably not meant to be, with its lurid, pulp-fiction, made-for-Hollywood plot. It is not clear, in fact, why this plot-line is in the book in the first place. But if it is there to illuminate some thematic quality of the more important civil rights story--again, a subject worthy of examination--it fails miserably, instead only serving to highlight the more improbable and ludicrous elements of it. Mr. Childress is a comptetent writer and knows how to sustain a narrative, but what he has constructed here, despite being occasionally entertaining, is lightweight and completely forgettable. He adds nothing which is fresh or new to what we know about the civil rights movement; peopling the opposition with standard, Southern-bumpkin caricatures, and grossly exaggerating the havoc created by them. What he does instead is to smugly congratulate his little Peejoe--and by extension himself--for merely coming to the correct political viewpoint. A viewpoint, I should add, which is today universally accepted. Big deal.
Rating:
Summary: Just finished reading the BEST book of my life!!!!
Review: The last book that moved me to tears was "To Kill a Mockingbird." The last book that made be laugh out loud was "A Confederacy of Dunces." I just whipped through 383 pages of brilliance in three days. I'm exhausted and exhilerated at the same time. This truly is the BEST book I have ever read bar none! I know that Columbia Pictures is releasing it this spring as a movie starring Melanie Griffith and directed by her husband Antonio Banderas. My Hollywood spies tell me this is going to be a GREAT movie -- the Martin Luther King/George Wallace scenes are thrilling and inspiring. Let's hope so! I think Griffith is the perfect choice for Lucille Bullis Vinton (a one-woman "Thelma and Louise"). Banderas is a long-shot as a director (you'd think an American-born director -- especially a Southerner -- would be the obvious choice, but maybe that would be a case of not seeing the forest for the trees). And what Robert Bloch/Alfred Hitchcock have done for showers, Mark Childress/Antonio Banderas will have done for Tupperware. (Better buy stock in Tupperware before the movie comes out, folks!) I can't give this book a higher recommendation!
Rating:
Summary: Tide Alum Pens A Winner w/ Crazy in Alabama
Review: The University of Alabama is known for having a winning tradition on the gridiron, but Alabama graduate Mark Childress is establishing a winning tradition of a different sort. His highly successful fiction book Crazy In Alabama is the funiest book I've ever read. Set in 1965, the reader is taken on a hillarious journey across country from Alabama to Hollywood
with Lucille, the wacko aunt of 12-year old Peejoe, the story's narrator, as she heads to audition for a part on the Beverly Hillbillies. Along for the ride in the back seat of a stolen Cadiallac, Lucille has the head of her husband Chester stored in a Tupperware lettuce crisper. Lucille gives Chester rat poison mixed in a cup of coffee, then decapitates him with the Sunbeam craving knife, because Chester refuses to let her go to Hollywood for the audition. It's Lucille's life long dream to be a Hollywood actress. One of the funiest lines from the book, Lucille says, "Chester said no, when he should've said yes." He'd still be alive. She drops their children off at her mother's and takes off as a fugitive. Peejoe is the only one she tells the whole story to, before she runs off. Along the way she gets into a number of funny situations, while back home in Alabama her family, in particular 12-year old Peejoe, are left to deal with the aftermath. A parallel story line in the book is the civil rights movement in small town Alabama and the very votile race relations during the times. I give Crazy in Alabama 5 out of 5 stars. The book was made into a movie and was the directorial debut of Antonio Bandraas. His wife Melanie Griffith starred as Lucille. I stongly suggest reading the book before watching the movie. The movie is not nearly as funny or well written as the book. Excellent book and a definite winner for author Mark Childress.
Rating:
Summary: Tide Alum Pens A Winner w/ Crazy in Alabama
Review: The University of Alabama is known for having a winning tradition on the gridiron, but Alabama graduate Mark Childress is establishing a winning tradition of a different sort. His highly successful fiction book Crazy In Alabama is the funiest book I've ever read. Set in 1965, the reader is taken on a hillarious journey across country from Alabama to Hollywood
with Lucille, the wacko aunt of 12-year old Peejoe, the story's narrator, as she heads to audition for a part on the Beverly Hillbillies. Along for the ride in the back seat of a stolen Cadiallac, Lucille has the head of her husband Chester stored in a Tupperware lettuce crisper. Lucille gives Chester rat poison mixed in a cup of coffee, then decapitates him with the Sunbeam craving knife, because Chester refuses to let her go to Hollywood for the audition. It's Lucille's life long dream to be a Hollywood actress. One of the funiest lines from the book, Lucille says, "Chester said no, when he should've said yes." He'd still be alive. She drops their children off at her mother's and takes off as a fugitive. Peejoe is the only one she tells the whole story to, before she runs off. Along the way she gets into a number of funny situations, while back home in Alabama her family, in particular 12-year old Peejoe, are left to deal with the aftermath. A parallel story line in the book is the civil rights movement in small town Alabama and the very votile race relations during the times. I give Crazy in Alabama 5 out of 5 stars. The book was made into a movie and was the directorial debut of Antonio Bandraas. His wife Melanie Griffith starred as Lucille. I stongly suggest reading the book before watching the movie. The movie is not nearly as funny or well written as the book. Excellent book and a definite winner for author Mark Childress.
|
