Blood and Grits is the ideal complement to Harry Crews' memoir of his first ten years, A Childhood: The Biography of A Place. Individually, these nonfiction pieces, most of which were first published in either Playboy or Esquire, appear to be about a wide variety of subjects--profiles of Charles Bronson and Robert Blake, encounters with a man who has spent his life mourning the lynching of an elephant and wilth some Deliverance-type hillbillies while hiking through the Appalachians, life with a traveling carnival, or juandiced looks at L.L. Bean and the people who travel in campers.