They Love A Man In The Country

They Love a Man in the Country is a piquant chronicle of politics in the South in the days when a politician had to entertain to be elected. Seasoned journalists Billy Bowles and Remer Tyson interviewed the powerful and the obscure: state leaders in the Deep South and feuding, trigger-happy bootleggers in the Cumberland Gap. While many figures are familiar beyond their consituency -- George Wallace, Orval Faubus, Happy Chandler -- the authors have included others less widely known whose recollections and anecdotes are equally entertaining. What emerges from these interviews is the sense of an era in which any ruse could be used to grease the cogs of power as long as it worked. Part social history, part political closeup of many of the South's most outrageous figures, They Love a Man in the Country takes us from the populist '30s through the civil rights struggles of the '60s and '70s. Bowles and Tyson have embraced the comedy and poignancy of their material in this rich distillation of Southern life.