A Delicious Country

“Huler’s adventures and misadventures on the road entertain and inform. He is the best type of tour guide, one who is well-informed but not at all pompous. His wry, self-deprecating sense of humor helps his serious medicine go down smoothly.”—D.G. Martin, One on One

“An ethnographic journey backward and forward in time through the lens of a culture’s pathways. . . . Like all 'road' books, the story here is about the journey, not the destination.”—North Carolina Historical Review

“Huler’s is a most delightful, thoughtful, and novel study—a delicious book to be sure—and one that will give A New Voyage more traction to be more widely read.”—Environmental History

“An engaging book that is of value to readers interested in John Lawson’s expedition, early eighteenth-century natural history and Carolina history, and the landscape and communities along Lawson’s trail. . . . [A]ppropriate for high school libraries and public and academic collections.”—North Carolina Libraries

“An absorbing read. Huler’s experiences during his modern trek do not, of course, duplicate what John Lawson found so long ago, but forms of beauty and dispossession rhyme down the centuries in thought-provoking patterns.” — Charles Frazier, author of Varina

“It’s been said that one of the only true plots is this: A man goes on a journey. In A Delicious Country, Scott Huler demonstrates why that narrative arc retains such strength. His retracing of John Lawson’s epic circumnavigation is thoughtful, relaxed, humorous, and generous. It retrieves for us a lost world of discovery and wonder and reminds us that the goal of every departure is to learn to value home.” — Maryn McKenna, author of Big Chicken: The Incredible Story of How Antibiotics Created Modern Agriculture and Changed the Way the World Eats

“An eye-opening journey through the contemporary South. As he does in his other excellent books, Huler reminds us in A Delicious Country that the present and the past coexist all around us. He writes with great specificity about each topic at hand, but he never loses sight of the larger human story. The book excels as a work of exploration, history, and science. It is also simply what reviewers like to call 'a rousing good read.'” — Michal Sims, author of The Adventures of Henry Thoreau

“From the boggy salt marshes near Charleston to the parking lot of the Charlotte Motor Speedway and beyond, Scott Huler has breathed new life into the English explorer John Lawson’s all-but-forgotten 1700 journey through the Carolinas. While much of the physical landscape has changed over the centuries, the characters who inhabit it are still vibrant, still contradictory, still completely unforgettable. Only a storyteller as warm and witty as Huler could wrangle such a sprawling, complex natural history into an engrossing travelogue that leaves the reader wanting nothing but more.” — Bronwen Dickey, author of Pit Bull: The Battle over an American Icon