Lynne M. Spreen describes the author as now 76, in a response dated April 2016. Tantor Audio published this audiobook in October 2017, roughly a year and a half afterward, which means the one concrete figure anywhere on the page had already gone stale before the recording existed. That is a small thing and a useful warning. Almost everything readable under Running on Red Dog Road was written about a printed memoir at a moment that has since moved on, and that number is the easiest place to catch it happening.
Short Stories That Make Up the Whole Book
Drema's father is killed in the coal mines, her mother leaves to work as a Rosie the Riveter, and she is handed to devout Pentecostal grandparents in 1940s Appalachia. What comes through that childhood is a parade: faith healers, moonshiners, snake handlers, poetry-writing hobos, traveling carnivals and tent revivals with Grandpa. The copy sells the result as a spitfire of a memoir that feels like a novel, and the claim survives contact, because the material is stranger than most invented childhoods and the family moving through it keeps refusing the stereotypes attached to the region. Berkheimer writes from far enough away that the strangeness still registers as strangeness, which is the memoirist's hardest trick to pull off.
Six hours and one minute makes this the sort of memoir you finish across two sittings, and the structure cooperates. SB describes it as short stories that make up the whole book, which is the right shape for audio: self-contained pieces, each with its own occasion, instead of a continuous narrative you have to hold in your head. A listener can step away and return without losing the thread, since the thread is a childhood, never a plot.
SB, raised in north Georgia, files the response that matters most to anyone weighing the audio edition, reporting that the language in this book recalled exactly how that reviewer's grandparents spoke. Diane Ertel arrives at the same place from a different porch, noting that Drema's grandmother and that reviewer's own used the same quaint phrases, ones that still seep into that reviewer's own sentences today. Two people praising the speech independently is a real signal, and speech is the thing a recording either preserves or flattens. The pleasure this column keeps circling lives in the sentences more than in the events.
Bailey Carr Is All You Have to Go On
Bailey Carr is given the whole memoir, and this is the listing where a lone credit carries the most weight. The appeal, on the column's own evidence, is largely a question of how people sounded: Appalachian phrasing, a grandmother's idiom, a Pentecostal grandfather at a tent revival. All of it has to come through one performer. Tantor Audio attaches no note about accent work, so the credit is all you have to go on. What these readers loved on the page is the same quality that will make or break six hours of audio.
Diane Ertel calls it a refreshing and simple book written with humor, and the word simple is doing careful work there. The prose is unadorned by design, the incidents are small, and the register stays warm even where the facts are hard, which they are: a father dead underground, a mother away on war work, a child raised by people a generation removed. Nothing in the telling is bleak. The circumstances underneath it very much are.
Sears catalogs, Rumford baking powder and Clabber Girl all surface in Lynne M. Spreen's account, which is the kind of detail that dates a childhood to the year. Period texture is the pleasure here more than incident is. Coffee Joe recommends the book as an escape from a world of turmoil and controversy, a pleasant and humorous story from days gone by, and that describes the effect accurately even if it does not ask much of it.
Boring to Everyone Else Is the Honest Complaint
Raymond H. Mullen breaks with the rest at three stars, and does it honestly. The objection is not aimed at this book but at the form: events that feel enormous to the person who lived them can end up a bit boring to everyone else, and that reviewer, having been urged to write a memoir, declined for exactly that reason. It is the most useful dissent available because it names a genre problem instead of a flaw. If quiet personal history leaves you cold, no amount of Appalachian texture is going to fix it. A three star grade reasoned through that carefully carries more information than four fives.
Arithmetic on this page does not close. The badge reads 4.4, the counter beneath it records three votes, and no combination of three whole star grades lands on 4.4 however you choose to round. Underneath that counter, five people have signed responses, two more than the count allows for. Neither fault touches the memoir. Both suggest the summary figure was assembled from something other than the column a shopper can actually see.
Tent revivals and snake handlers are what put the Religious tag on this listing, and it helps to know what the tag means here. Faith is the water this childhood swims in, not a subject the book argues over. The grandparents are devout, the revivals are occasions and not lessons, and the whole business gets treated with affection and no evangelism. Anyone expecting devotional content will find a childhood, and anyone expecting mockery will not find that either.
Bailey Carr Has the Language to Carry It
Grandchildren of the rural South are the readiest audience, judging by two responses that spent most of their words on their own grandparents ahead of Drema's. Past them, this suits anyone who likes a memoir built from short pieces, anyone drawn to 1940s Appalachian life, and anyone wanting six hours of warmth with no cynicism attached. SB thought enough of the book to buy three copies and hand them out to friends. Six hours also makes for an easy gift, which is more or less what that respondent has been doing with it.
Leave it if personal history bores you as a form, which the single dissenting response argues persuasively and from experience. Leave it too when you want the hard version of Appalachia, since the description promises charm and the reviewers supply the matching vocabulary: genteel, pleasant, humorous, refreshing. Six hours is a small ask for a childhood this well populated, and Bailey Carr has the language to carry.
A Few Questions About Running on Red Dog Road
What kind of memoir is Running on Red Dog Road?
An episodic one. One respondent calls it short pieces assembled into a single volume, and the publisher's copy agrees, offering a parade of faith healers, moonshiners, snake handlers, carnivals and tent revivals. The through line is a 1940s Appalachian childhood, not a single unfolding story.
Does the Appalachian speech survive into the audiobook?
That is the open question, and this is the listing where it matters most. Two respondents single out the language, saying it matched how their own grandparents spoke. All of that dialect has to reach you through Bailey Carr alone, and Tantor Audio publishes no note about accent work.
How reliable is the 4.4 badge on this page?
Not very. The counter records three votes, and no set of three whole star grades averages to 4.4 under any rounding rule. Five signed responses appear below it, which is two beyond what the counter admits to. The written paragraphs are trustworthy; the number sitting above them is not.
Is this audiobook religious in content?
It carries a Religious tag because the author was raised by devout Pentecostal grandparents, with tent revivals and snake handlers among the childhood scenery. Faith is atmosphere here, never argument. Listeners looking for devotional material should look elsewhere, and listeners wary of preaching will find none.
