MOON HANDBOOKS TENNESSEE

Witty and opinionated author Jeff Bradley knows the best ways to explore the state, from the Smoky Mountains to the legendary music of Memphis and Nashville. His firsthand experience and honest insight will show you the difference between visiting Tennessee and knowing it.

Moon Handbooks Tennessee
4th Edition
Jeff Bradley
ISBN 1-56691-693-3
$19.95
Purchase here through Amazon.com or visit Indiebound.org to find your local independent bookseller.

Jeff Bradley was born and raised in Kingsport, a Tennessee town that once sentenced an elephant to death and, while Bradley was a guileless child, was the last place Elvis ever played second on the bill. Bradley learned about Tennessee at his mother's knee and other low joints. He later became a dump truck driver and got a taste of what it would be like to drive along country roads and get paid for doing so.
   He went off to the University of Tennessee intent on becoming a broadcaster, but a few weeks of sitting in classes with Neanderthal football players convinced him to switch to journalism. He did the smartest thing any male writer can do—marry a good woman who has a job—and began a career of freelance writing. He became a stringer for the New York Times, and this led to an offer to teach writing to Harvard freshmen.
   The chance to educate impressionable youth who paid sky-high tuition and hung on every word was irresistible, so Bradley and wife decamped to Massachusetts, where he quickly found that his Southern accent led people to respond slowly and distinctly, treating him like a benign rustic. While privately decrying the attitudes that Harvardians held toward Southerners, Bradley and two other Tennesseans never passed up a chance to hijack dinner parties with an endless repertoire of snake stories, tales of weird relatives, and descriptions of Baptist gospel disk jockeys.
   It finally dawned on Bradley that, short of loading up outlanders in buses and giving them personal tours of Tennessee, the best way to explain this remarkable state to infidels was to write a book about it.

Other travel guides authored by Jeff Bradley:
Moon Handbooks Smoky Mountains