Why Dogs Chase Cars Tales of a Beleaguered Boyhood

As a boy growing up in the tiny backwater town of Forty-Five, South Carolina, all Mendal Dawes wants is out. It's not just his hometown that's hopeless. Mendal's father is just as bad. He buries stuff in the backyard--fake toxic barrels, imitation Burma Shave signs (Bird on a Wire, Bird on a Perch, Fly toward Heaven, First Baptist Church), yardstick collections. He calls Mendal "Fuzznuts." He makes him recite Marx and Durkheim daily and take terrible unpaid jobs helping out at nursing homes and tutoring little Shirley Ebo in reading.This funky, sometimes outrageous, and always very human book is about how the only son of a weirdo learns what a wizard his father really was--after it's too late. On the way to witnessing that understanding, we get to watch this duo's precarious relationship in a place with "a gene pool so shallow that it wouldn't take a Dr. Scholl's insert to keep one's soles dry."To be consistently funny is a great gift, but to be funny and cynical and empathetic all at the same time is George Singleton's special gift. As Candler Hunt of Olssons Books and Records, Washington D.C., has said, "This is not your mother's Southern fiction."