MY LIFE IN THE NORTH WOODS

by Robert Smith ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 5, 1986

An essay of remembrance of the author's stint in a lumber camp in Maine during the Depression. Smith (One Winter in Boston, MacArthur in Korea, Baseball in America) tells of his dropping out of college and getting hired as a clerk in a lumber camp at 18, and how this experience brought him to a coming of age of sorts. Here was a bastion of macho men, hard drinkers who worked hard and lived to collect their pay and seek the pleasures of loose women in the nearest town. An interesting array of characters makes their way through the narrative--Jenny White, a port for everyman's storm, including the up-to-then virginal Smith; Stapleton, the government snoop, always looking for signs of hooch in that Prohibitionist time; the hated Kendall, the town undertaker, suspected of killing a local man, and who figures in the denouement of Smith's story. Smith is most concerned with the people who populated his world then; the reader will find little description of the lumbering trade. And as a snippet of biography magnified, it leaves the reader unfulfilled about a way of life that is no more, and about the life that followed.

Pub Date: Sept. 5, 1986

ISBN: N/A

Page Count: -

Publisher: Atlantic Monthly--dist. by Little, Brown

Review Posted Online: N/A

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 1986

Categories: NONFICTION