"House of Smoke" is a valuable & informative addition to the narrative of the contemporary south. John T Edge, known for his writing about Southern foodways and culture, writes in an accessible, friendly, & thoughtful tone, and addresses the various ways that the legacy of the American south shaped him.

I really enjoyed this memoir, and felt it captured a the way a lot of people grew up in the South, and how they have changed. I was not familiar with the writings of John T. Edge, but will read some of his earlier works after reading House of Smoke. In House of Smoke, Edge talks about his mother, an alcoholic and a woman who loved the pageantry of the "old south". Growing up in a confederate General Iverson's house, Edge learned a fairy tale of the noble Southerner, and in later years he had to come to terms with the fallacies that he learned at home. I could picture his escapades as a Sigma Nu in Athens, listening to the music of REM and spraying cocktails out of a garden hose. I have mixed emotions about his time at the Southern Foodways Alliance - the ending seemed brutal. House of Smoke makes me want to learn more about the South - and how it is reckoning with its past.