Dispatches from the Gilded Age: A Few More Thoughts on Interesting People, Far-Flung Places, and the Joys of Southern Comforts

by Julia Reed, Everett Bexley (Editor), Carol Monda (Read by), Roy Blount Jr. (Foreword by)

Overview

Dispatches from the Gilded Age is a collection of essays by Julia Reed, one of America’s greatest chroniclers.

In the middle of the night on March eleventh, 1980, the phone rang in Julia Reed’s Georgetown dorm. It was her boss at Newsweek, where she was an intern. He told her to get in her car and drive to her alma mater, the Madeira School. Her former headmistress, Jean Harris, had just shot Dr. Herman Tarnower, The Scarsdale Diet Doctor. Julia didn’t flinch. She dressed, drove to Madeira, got the story—and her first byline—and the new American Gilded Age was off and running.

The end of the twentieth century and the beginning of the twenty-first was a time in which the high and the low bubbled furiously together and Julia was there with her sharp eye, keen wit, and uproariously clear-eyed way of seeing the world to chronicle this truly spectacular era. Dispatches from the Gilded Age is Julia at her best as she profiles Andre Leon Talley, Sister Helen Prejean, President George and Laura Bush, Madeleine Albright, and others. Listeners will travel to Africa and Cuba with Julia, dine at Le Bernardin, savor steaks at Doe’s Eat Place, consider the fashions of the day, get the recipes for her hot cheese olives and end up with the ride of their lives through Julia’s beloved South.

With a foreword by Roy Blount, Jr. and edited by Julia’s longtime assistant, Everett Bexley.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9798200927159
Publisher:	Blackstone Publishing
Publication date:	08/30/2022
Product dimensions:	5.30(w) x 7.50(h) x (d)

About the Author

JULIA REED (1960-2020) was a contributing editor at Garden & Gun, where she wrote the magazine's "The High & the Low" column. Her books include But Mama Always Puts Vodka in Her Sangria; Ham Biscuits, Hostess Gowns, and Other Southern Specialties; and Queen of the Turtle Derby and Other Southern Phenomena. Reed divided her time between New Orleans and Greenville, Mississippi.

Everett Bexley grew up in Vicksburg, Mississippi and is now pursuing an MFA in fiction at Syracuse University. He was the longtime assistant to Julia Reed. He is the author of Dispatches from the Gilded Age.

Roy Blount Jr. is the author of Alphabet Juice and books covering subjects from the Pittsburgh Steelers to Robert E. Lee to what dogs are thinking. Born in Indianapolis and raised in Decatur, Georgia, Blount lives in western Massachusetts with his wife, the painter Joan Griswold.

Table of Contents

Foreword Roy Blount Jr. 1

Part 1 How It All Started

1 The Lady and the Doctor 9

Part 2 Fashion and Beauty

2 Clothes Encounters 15

3 Lip Service 21

4 Portrait of a Lady 26

5 A Case Study 36

6 On the Scent 40

7 Knee High 45

Part 3 People

8 Witness at the Execution 53

9 Woman of the World 68

10 Sister Act 84

11 Winning Combination 94

12 André Leon Talley's Deep Southern Roots 100

Part 4 Adventures

13 Diary of a Spa 111

14 Fountain of Youth 121

15 Accidental Africa 129

16 Our Girl in Havana 139

17 Slow Train to China 169

18 Extreme Makeover 181

Part 5 Scenes from a Life

19 Dis Engaged 195

20 The Party Line 200

21 Whose Life Is It Anyway? 206

22 The "I Don't" Honeymoon 214

Part 6 Food and Feasting

23 Southern Sideshow 219

24 Food Memories from the South (of France) 224

25 Crazy for Catfish 230

26 Secrets of a Southern Hostess 235

27 Cooking Through COVID 240

Part 7 The South

28 The Southern Name Change 247

29 Cat Tails 252

30 A Delta Housewarming 258

31 All Praise Willie Nelson 264

32 The Politics of a Summer Escape 270

33 Out to Pasture 276

34 JT in My Mind 281

35 Sheltering … at Home 287

36 My Home Is My (Animal) Kingdom 292

Index 297

Editorial Reviews

04/11/2022

Garden & Gun columnist Reed (Julia Reed’s New Orleans), who died in 2020, profiles activists and artists, travels to exotic locales, and offers tart advice on food and fashion in this colorful essay collection spanning her 40-year career. The book opens with Reed’s first byline, a Newsweek story about the 1980 murder of Scarsdale Diet doctor Herman Tarnower by his girlfriend Jean Harris. (Reed, a college sophomore and “part-time library assistant/phone answerer” at the magazine, got the assignment because Harris was the headmistress at her former private school in McLean, Va.) Elsewhere, Reed has a spirited sit-down with death penalty activist Sister Helen Prejean (“I quit trying so hard not to take the Lord’s name in vain when she told me an old Mickey Mouse joke with the f-word in it”); recalls how her friends treated her “like someone just diagnosed with a brain tumor” when she called off her first wedding; visits a beauty school in war-torn Kabul, Afghanistan; and reflects on how cooking brought her solace during the early months of the Covid-19 pandemic. Sharp and fearless, these essays are a fitting tribute to Reed’s life and career. (Aug.)

Publishers Weekly

"Sharp and fearless, these essays are a fitting tribute to Reed’s life and career." —Publishers Weekly

"A selection of sparkling essays by a great Southern wit, foodie, fashionista, and prose stylist...There is life after death—at least for an essayist with this much verve on the page." —Kirkus Reviews

From the Publisher

2022-05-11
A selection of sparkling essays by a great Southern wit, foodie, fashionista, and prose stylist.

Reed (1960-2020) was a 19-year-old undergrad at Georgetown when the headmistress of her former boarding school killed the doctor who created the Scarsdale diet. An editor Reed had interned with at Newsweek remembered the connection and sent her to cover it. So began a brilliant career. The breezy foreword by Roy Blount Jr. fails to tell the novice a few things that bring the joys of this sampler of Reed's magazine work, dated and organized by theme, into sharp focus. The details about Reed’s death, following a long battle with cancer, affect one's reading of the essays she wrote that year, hilarious accounts of her "first world problems" during the pandemic—e.g., pest infestations; the complexities of quarantine cooking and dining. "On Mother’s Day, [my mother and I] sat at opposite ends of my outdoor table and shared a rack of lamb with an inspired mint sauce,” she writes. That was their last Mother's Day, and they both knew it. Her decision not to mention her illness in this or any other essay that appeared in her long-running column in Garden and Gun recalls Nora Ephron, another seemingly candid but actually quite reserved personal essayist always ready with the bright, deflecting wisecrack. Similarly poignant are essays that touch on Reed’s friendship with André Leon Talley, the late Vogue editor at large and kindred spirit. Talley helped her order her trousseau for a huge Mississippi wedding she cancelled at the last minute in 2011—then took the honeymoon anyway, she and her ex-fiance joining Talley and other friends in Paris. Also preserved in this collection are prime examples of Reed’s droll, incisive writing about her Southern roots alongside puff pieces on the Bush twins and surprising angles on Nixon, Cheney, and others. As Blount points out, Reed was “a Republican—of a decidedly secular, anti-Trump, anti-death-penalty, gender-and-race-friendly, Delta-proud variety all her own.”

There is life after death—at least for an essayist with this much verve on the page.

Kirkus Reviews