Beauty Before Comfort

Rating:
Summary: It's good
Review: This is a good book. The author avoids the self-indulgent aspects of most memoirs and has a great sense of humor. I think this is just as much a book about living in the south as it is about her grandmother. If you like pot liquor, you'll like this book.

Rating:
Summary: Kicks butt
Review: This is such a poignant story, compellingly told. I'm a guy and I didn't expect to be so taken by the book. But I was. It read like a great novel.

Rating:
Summary: The Simple Life
Review: This memoir proves that the simple life is far from boring when one can fully recognize the complex characters in all of us. I love the idea that this memoir is not about a mediocre personality that just happens to find themselves in extreme situations, and so in lies the story. I was elated to finally find a memoir and author that glorifies life, exactly as it is given to us.

Rating:
Summary: So far from garbage...so beautiful
Review: Well, I don't know what the negative reviewers were reading, but they clearly took some offense to components I did not see in this beautiful book. Having grown up in the mountains of North Carolina, I am always on the lookout for books about life in Appalachia, and "Beauty Before Comfort" has to be one of the best in recent years. The honesty, reality, humor--they recall Dorothy Allison's "Bastard Out of Carolina" and the poetry of Kathryn Stripling Byer. Glock deserves a place at the table of strong, stunning Southern women writers.