Delightful & meaningful book about author's larger than life father - very Mississippi. ( )

I loved the first 13 chapters! They were laugh out loud funny, with just the right amount of cynicism and sentimentality. Mississippi is truly another country, maybe even another planet(my mother was born and raised there but she always told people she was from Memphis, that says a lot).

What happened after Chapter 13? He got married, his wife finally got pregnant, they moved to Savannah, they had kids, they had marriage problems, blah blah blah. Yep, with the exception of chapter 18, chapters 14 through the end of the book could have been anybody's life, living in any state in America. And I really did not need to have an entire chapter about potty training his daughter, yeah everyone who has kids has to go through this and no it is not fun (altho I think most of us get our kids fully trained before they are 5, unlike the author and his wife)-Really 5?! Nor did I need an entire chapter of his wife's pregnancy and 32 hours of labor with no drugs.

And of course the last chapter is devoted to rhapsodizing about what a great, wonderful dad he had. That's nice, but a little sentimental goo goes a long way.

So here's my recommendation. Read the first 13 chapters chapter 18, then stop and you will think the book deserves 5 stars. I wish had. ( )

Key is a very funny guy. But in this memoir about his growing up in Mississippi and tales of an often strained and awkward relationship with his father, he can also move you to tears. I wanted to read this book after reading his second book (due out in November 2018) - CONGRATULATIONS, WHO ARE YOU AGAIN? - which was largely about the writing and publishing of THIS book, and his adventures in academia, higher education, and crippling student loan debts. I thoroughly enjoyed THE WORLD'S LARGEST MAN, but I may have liked the newer book even more. It took Harrison Scott Key years to find his "voice," but now that he has, he's rockin' it. One of the best - and funniest - books about fathers and sons that I've read in recent years. Very highly recommended.

- Tim Bazzett, author of the memoir, BOOKLOVER ( )

"You ever speak to old Lamar Bibbs?" Pop would say.

"Not since him and Gola Mae went down yonder after the thing up at the place," Monk would say.

The younger me would perk up, eager to hear some gothic fable drawn from the mists of Mississippi Hill Country lore. Perhaps a story about a mule trampling a baby, or the time when everyone got the yellow fever and died.

But all was quiet. Monk would be leaning over and staring at his folded hands, as though he had be bludgeoned with a skillet, while Pop would be studying his dentures, which he held in his palm like a small, wounded vole. Then he would put them back into his mouth, having divested them of any lingering corn.

Harrison Scott Key tells the story of his own boyhood, where he lived with his family in rural Mississippi. His father was a force of nature, a man who was going to mold his son into his own image; a sports-playing, animal-hunting man's man. This worked well enough with his older brother, but Harrison mainly wanted to read books and go grocery shopping with his mother. Even as he did his best to thwart his father's ambitions, he still lived under the shadow of his father.

I was always coy about my books, afraid Pop would find them effeminate. In our family, the only books men read were in the Bible and you weren't supposed to do it for fun. You did it because Jesus would hurt you if you didn't.

This is a very funny book. It's fatal flaw is that it often reaches for humor when it should reach for something more honest and heart-felt. Key occasionally moves in that direction; a later chapter about his marriage approaches real depth, but for the most part, this remains just a funny book about being bad at hunting and about a boy trying to become a man, when the example of manhood in front of him is far from who he wants to be.

Pop didn't have friends, which he believed were things meant for women and children, as were holidays and happiness. A real man didn't need all that. All a man needed was a gun and a wood stove and maybe, if things got bad, a towel for the blood. ( )

Hilarious, tender, rough memoir of growing up and a father who was so very big, and strong, and 'manly,' and so very different than he... ( )