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Thin Blue Smoke: A Novel About Music, Food, and Love, by Doug Worgul
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This title is an epic American redemption tale about love and loss, hope and despair, God and whiskey, barbecue and the blues. LaVerne Williams is a ruined ex-big league ballplayer, an ex-felon with an attitude problem, and the owner of a barbecue joint he has to run. Ferguson Glen is an Episcopal priest, a fading literary star with a drinking problem, and a past he is running from. A.B. Clayton and Sammy Merzeti are two lost souls in need of love, understanding, and another cigarette. Hilarious and heart-rending, sacred and profane, this book marks the emergence of a vital new voice in American fiction.
- Sales Rank: #980502 in Books
- Published on: 2015-06-02
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: 8.40" h x 1.20" w x 5.50" l, .0 pounds
- Binding: Paperback
- 460 pages
Review
"As Norman Maclean’s A River Runs Through It does for Montana fly-fishing, Doug Worgul’s Thin Blue Smoke makes the poetry of Kansas City barbecue accessible to all readers. More than gorgeous prose and fully developed characters, this novel offers us catharsis." —Matthew Quick, author, The Silver Linings Playbook
"In our world of increasing isolation and infidelity, Thin Blue Smoke stirs our imaginations with the hope of what is possible through deep and tenacious friendships." —C. Christopher Smith, editor, The Englewood Review of Books
"Thin Blue Smoke is a wandering through a community bound by their shared histories, their dreams, and the food they love. It reminds me of the best things in life. And Doug Worgul has done what all great writers strive to do: make you crave for more." —Rajiv Joseph, playwright, Gruesome Playground Injuries
"[There is a] sort of Buechnarian tragedy, comedy, and fairy tale that laces this novel . . . It reminded me of a couple of my favorite books: David James Duncan’s The Brother’s K and Anne Tyler’s Saint Maybe. The characters of Thin Blue Smoke are not unlike most of us—sidetracked and puzzled, reaching for something they can’t quite name." —Dale Brown, founding director, Buechner Institute
About the Author
Doug Worgul is the director of marketing at Joe’s Kansas City Bar-B-Que and a nationally recognized authority on American barbecue traditions. He has worked as an editor, features editor, and senior book editor at The Kansas City Star. He is the author of The Grand Barbecue and A Table Full of Welcome. He lives in Leawood, Kansas.
Most helpful customer reviews
8 of 8 people found the following review helpful.
Feels like Wendell Berry but urban and modern
By Adam Shields
I always find it hard to write reviews of fiction books I really like. I never want to give away too much of the plot. And I usually fall back to talking about how beautiful the language is or how engaging the plot.
In some ways what want is to ask you to just trust me and go ahead and read the book. It is only $3.99 on kindle right now. This version (http://www.amazon.com/Thin-Blue-Smoke-ebook/dp/B0091NDAEA/)
But asking you to trust me is not good enough. Thin Blue Smoke is not an action packed story. It is a story that you make your way through. At some point I felt like it might never end. And then I hoped it wouldn't ever end.
The connecting tissue of the book is Smoke Meat. A small BBQ joint in Kansas City. The owner is a former baseball player. His assistant AB is his late son's best friend. Their regular customers include an elderly blues singer, an alcoholic Episcopal priest and professor, a wealthy developer, cops, journalists and more.
This books jumps all over time, from character to character revealing more and more about the common human nature and need of all people. There are lots of mistakes and sins that have brought everyone to where they are right now. But there is also a God that is present, even in tragedy.
This is a book about the journey toward redemption. The conclusion is a bit abrupt and not completely satisfying,b ut the point of the book is not the conclusion. The point of the story is the journey.
This is not a standard fare Christian novel. It clearly is a Christian novel. God is present here. Thin Blue Smoke presents characters as real people. They drink, have sex, curse, kill, cry and love. This is the type of Christian novel that changes people's perceptions of Christian novels. Christian novels can be more than thinly veiled evangelism or Amish romance. Christian novels can present true life, the way that we actually live it, not just the idealized way that we wish we could.
4 of 4 people found the following review helpful.
Three Things I Love
By Matthew R. Ralph
I was talking to a friend recently about this wonderful novel I had just read called Thin Blue Smoke. "It's about baseball, barbecue and God," I told him. "Three things I love."
In truth, baseball and God are more behind the scenes players in the novel set at a Kansas City barbecue joint that also pulls in a series of other topics ranging from gentrification and civil rights to mental illness, alcoholism and problem gambling.
The barbecue joint, affectionately known as Smoke Meat, is a key player in the narrative that unfolds about its grumpy former Kansas City Athletics outfielder owner LaVerne Williams and the diverse cast of characters who frequent Kansas City's best kept culinary secret. Through the richly developed characters, Doug Worgul weaves the kind of story that brings the characters so vividly to life you'll find yourself wanting to Google them to see "where they are now" when you finish reading it.
I'm a recent convert to the world of barbecue enthusiasm, thanks in part to the aforementioned friend who most recently introduced me to Carolina barbecue. Before reading Thin Blue Smoke I would say everything I knew about appreciating barbecue I learned from him. Worgul, who in his bio is referenced as "a nationally-recognized authority on the history and cultural significance of American barbecue traditions," has now become my other source for appreciating not just the culture and tradition, but the spiritual significance as well.
Barbecue, as Williams explains toward the end of the book, is about making something special out of the not so glamorous, taking the pieces of meat that would be otherwise discarded or tough to eat and turning them into something memorable. This process occurs not just with the meat in this story, but with the people whose lives cross paths and change forever over a checkered tablecloth and a basket of smoked brisket.
A true testament to Worgul's gift as as a writer and food critic is his ability to bring you into this world without making you feel like an outsider who has only ever eaten at Famous Dave's. Like the fictional BBQ joint that welcomes all comers, Worgul's book manages to include all of the elements of a great novel English majors spend four years studying without ever coming across as one of those books that strokes literary critics egos while boring everyone else to tears (there's a reason I've read so little fiction since earning a degree in English). In the end, the book accomplishes what all good works of art should - it inspired me to consider taking up fiction writing again, imagining and re-visiting characters I've created and long since forgotten from my days as an aspiring fiction writer.
At the risk of sounding hyperbolic, the book has done for me at 34 what To Kill A Mockingbird did to me at 13. It's restored my love and appreciation of the novel and reminded me the value and importance of stories that come to life and characters who occupy our imaginations.
3 of 3 people found the following review helpful.
Smoky, Tasty Redemption Tale
By Glenn Hager
I am seriously moved, definitely warmed and inspired as I just finished a new novel by Doug Worgul, entitled, Thin Blue Smoke.
These characters got into my heart and let me know I still have a heart. They're real and flawed. Some of them have had some really bad breaks in life, but those bad breaks did not set their destiny; one human being caring about another did.
Having stumbled upon a review while surfing my Facebook updates, it was the context of Kansas City barbecue that intrigued me because I love barbecue and spent a good many years living just north and later, just south of KC. A downtown hole-the-wall barbecue joint is a connecting point for many of the characters in the story.
Food, friends, and faith are all meshed in a raw and real way to keep you eagerly reading. I was sucked in with a mention of my hometown in the first paragraph of chapter one and later references to obscure northwestern Missouri locales, all of which were familiar to me.
Worgul is a former features, book and magazine editor for the Kansas City Star, the author of two non-fiction works, and a bona fide barbecue expert. He writes so beautifully and warmly that you know this man knows something about people, God, relationships, redemption, and barbecue. It's not preachy in the least and is not a Christian book, in any conventional sense, but its message of love and redemption through relationships is, perhaps, the most beautiful I have ever read.
The characters are colorful, including the cranky old former professional baseball player and proprietor of the BBQ joint, the sort of adopted lost boy who runs the place, the scholarly, alcoholic, has been author Episcopal priest, the real estate developer with a secret, and the seventy-five year-old local legend blues singer, known as Mother. These are real people who have serious regrets, drink too much, have sex, and yes, some of them, are violent and corrupt. Not everyone is redeemed. It's like life.
There are scenes so tender that they got to a crusty old dude like me. The eccentricities of the people made me laugh out loud and the circumstances of their love and grief caused me to weep silently.
I loved reading this rich and rewarding story set in a place I know, but it is the people (I don't even think of them as characters) that encouraged me and inspired me to see if maybe, somehow in the twists and turns of life, I could be something of a redeeming influence for somebody.
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