"A vivid portrait of legendary liquor agent Gar-land Bunting, an American original who pa-trolled rural North Carolina when moonshiners still patrolled the back-country. For thirty-five years, Gar-land Bunting slid his "sweet potato shape-small at both ends and big in the middle" onto the front seat of his beat-up pickup with the coon dogs in the back to ride around in pursuit of moonshine stills in Halifax County, North Carolina. Bunting was true a one-of-a-kind, a man who would do nearly anything to get his culprit. To ...
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"A vivid portrait of legendary liquor agent Gar-land Bunting, an American original who pa-trolled rural North Carolina when moonshiners still patrolled the back-country. For thirty-five years, Gar-land Bunting slid his "sweet potato shape-small at both ends and big in the middle" onto the front seat of his beat-up pickup with the coon dogs in the back to ride around in pursuit of moonshine stills in Halifax County, North Carolina. Bunting was true a one-of-a-kind, a man who would do nearly anything to get his culprit. To best the bootleggers, Bunting passed himself off as an outrageous array of characters, including a door-to-door fish peddler, a preacher, a farmer, a fox hunter, a sawmill worker, and a woman. Articulate, canny, imaginative, and aware-aware even that he's an unusual character-Bunting fills the foreground of Alec Wilkinson's deeply report-ed and elegantly told story. Moonshine is a wonderfully alive portrait of both Bunting and rural North Carolina's costal plain, with its landscape of small farms, woods, and swamps. We meet the people Bunting grew up with, his fellow liquor agents, his cronies, and his shy wife, Colleen. Along the way, we learn the history of moon-shine and how it is made, and accompany Bunting on the stake-out of a small backwoods still. Full of humor, energy, and a deeply haunting quality, the flavors of the past and present are richly inter-mingled in Moonshine. This Nonpareil edition includes a new introduction by acclaimed author Padgett Powell"--
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This book is essentially a collection of stories about the career of a state liquor agent in North Carolina. If you like stories about catching bootleggers, locating stills or reading books with southern slang, then this is the book for you.