Reading the South

by Hal Jacobs

James Cobb's Georgia Odyssey belongs in the welcome basket of every person who moves to Georgia -- and gets a welcome basket. It's described as "a short history of the state," and its brevity is smart and soulful. Cobb is a native son, and like native sons Roy Blount Jr. and Harry Crews (who he is fond of quoting), he is one of those clear-eyed souls who doesn't get all misty at the opening words of Lanier's "Song of the Chattahoochee" that he was probably forced to memorize as a school child ("Out of the hills of Habersham, Down the valleys of Hall, I hurry amain to reach the plain, Run the rapid and leap the fall," and so on and so on).

Cobb covers a lot of ground, from debunking the myth that the state owes its orgins to being a dumping ground for criminals and debtors (it was actually the "noblest of social experiments" and eschewed slavery during its first years) to the predilection for double-wide trailers. And often as not, he's got the data to back up his case: "Wide or narrow, mobile homes accounted for at least 25 percent of the housing units in sixty-five counties in 1990. Modular living and multichannel viewing seemed to carry revolutionary sociological implications, but Georgians quickly clasped these innovations to their cultural bosoms." He also mixes in a lot of good old jokes that say as much about the lives of Georgians as the empirical data: "What do a tornado and a South Georgia divorcee have in common? . . . Sooner of later, they're both gonna get the double-wide."

Readers who spend a few hours with this informative, entertaining little book will walk away with all sorts of handy insights. For instance, did you know forty-six cents of every dining-out dollar spent in Georgia goes for fast food (Georgia was ranked as the nation's twelfth-most obese state in 2007)? And if you really want to know what makes the rest of Georgia (the part outside of Atlanta) tick, you'll probably find no better explanation than the one he quotes from Crews: "The world that circumscribed the people I come from had so little margin for error, for bad luck, that when something went wrong, it almost always brought something else down with it. It was a world in which survival depended on raw courage born out of desperation and sustained by a lack of alternatives."

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