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THE CHATTAHOOCHEE BOYS

Name: THE CHATTAHOOCHEE BOYS
Author: J. Slater Baker
ISBN: 978-1461188582

by J. Slater Baker ‧ RELEASE DATE: Aug. 19, 2011

A collection of warm memories; an unaffected ode to a faded, Southern way of growing up.

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A debut memoir that tracks the early life, hijinks and carefree days of a Southern mill-town boy.

Baker and his childhood friends—often nameless and always mischievous—flooded a Depression-era Atlanta suburb with their tricks. Life was “hard and money was scarce for the people who worked in the cotton mill and lived in the village.” A little shabby, but better off than many of the families of the Great Depression, the boys poach golf balls, chase baseballs, peep at girls, steal turnips and dodge ornery neighbors. They pound rats, repeat grades, roll sloppy cigarettes, covet each others’ hunting boots and slowly discover the joys and terrors of girls. And that’s all before high school starts. The scenes are self-contained and read like they’re told from a porch rocker. The forgettable anecdotes rely on slim memories and trivial details. But the best of the group relate the hard coming-of-age realities the boys uncover, usually by accident. In one, an older girl is jilted by her faraway sailor. In another, the author discovers that, though he never before had cause to think about it, his father’s job makes him unwelcome in one of Atlanta’s finer neighborhoods. Baker describes a string of teenage spare-change jobs, one of which included breaking down junk cars all the way to their seat springs. His book follows a similar track. Each chapter shows a set piece or shenanigan, like an isolated car part, in detail—from Halloween pranks to stolen rowboats and from skinny-dipping to tent-revival kissing—but no cohesive narrative emerges to crank the engine and keep the parts moving together.

A collection of warm memories; an unaffected ode to a faded, Southern way of growing up.

Pub Date: Aug. 19, 2011

ISBN: 978-1461188582

Page Count: 172

Publisher: CreateSpace

Review Posted Online: Aug. 24, 2012

Review Program: Kirkus Indie

Categories:

FAMILY & RELATIONSHIPS

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THE MINOTAUR AT CALLE LANZA

by Zito Madu ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 2, 2024

An intriguing but uneven family memoir and travelogue.

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An author’s trip to Venice takes a distinctly Borgesian turn.

In November 2020, soccer club Venizia F.C. offered Nigerian American author Madu a writing residency as part of its plan “to turn the team into a global entity of fashion, culture, and sports.” Flying to Venice for the fellowship, he felt guilty about leaving his immigrant parents, who were shocked to learn upon moving to the U.S. years earlier that their Nigerian teaching certifications were invalid, forcing his father to work as a stocking clerk at Rite Aid to support the family. Madu’s experiences in Venice are incidental to what is primarily a story about his family, especially his strained relationship with his father, who was disappointed with many of his son’s choices. Unfortunately, the author’s seeming disinterest in Venice renders much of the narrative colorless. He says the trip across the Ponte della Libertà bridge was “magical,” but nothing he describes—the “endless water on both sides,” the nearby seagulls—is particularly remarkable. Little in the text conveys a sense of place or the unique character of his surroundings. Madu is at his best when he focuses on family dynamics and his observations that, in the largely deserted city, “I was one of the few Black people around.” He cites Borges, giving special note to the author’s “The House of Asterion,” in which the minotaur “explains his situation as a creature and as a creature within the labyrinth” of multiple mirrors. This notion leads to the Borgesian turn in the book’s second half, when, in an extended sequence, Madu imagines himself transformed into a minotaur, with “the head of a bull” and his body “larger, thicker, powerful but also cumbersome.” It’s an engaging passage, although stylistically out of keeping with much of what has come before.

An intriguing but uneven family memoir and travelogue.

Pub Date: April 2, 2024

ISBN: 9781953368669

Page Count: 144

Publisher: Belt Publishing

Review Posted Online: Nov. 17, 2023

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2023

Categories:

GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | FAMILY & RELATIONSHIPS | ETHNICITY & RACE

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THIS TIME NEXT YEAR WE'LL BE LAUGHING

by Jacqueline Winspear ‧ RELEASE DATE: Nov. 10, 2020

An engaging childhood memoir and a deeply affectionate tribute to the author’s parents.

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The bestselling author recalls her childhood and her family’s wartime experiences.

Readers of Winspear’s popular Maisie Dobbs mystery series appreciate the London investigator’s canny resourcefulness and underlying humanity as she solves her many cases. Yet Dobbs had to overcome plenty of hardships in her ascent from her working-class roots. Part of the appeal of Winspear’s Dobbs series are the descriptions of London and the English countryside, featuring vividly drawn particulars that feel like they were written with firsthand knowledge of that era. In her first book of nonfiction, the author sheds light on the inspiration for Dobbs and her stories as she reflects on her upbringing during the 1950s and ’60s. She focuses much attention on her parents’ lives and their struggles supporting a family, as they chose to live far removed from their London pasts. “My parents left the bombsites and memories of wartime London for an openness they found in the country and on the land,” writes Winspear. As she recounts, each of her parents often had to work multiple jobs, which inspired the author’s own initiative, a trait she would apply to the Dobbs character. Her parents recalled grueling wartime experiences as well as stories of the severe battlefield injuries that left her grandfather shell-shocked. “My mother’s history,” she writes, “became my history—probably because I was young when she began telling me….Looking back, her stories—of war, of abuse at the hands of the people to whom she and her sisters had been billeted when evacuated from London, of seeing the dead following a bombing—were probably too graphic for a child. But I liked listening to them.” Winspear also draws distinctive portraits of postwar England, altogether different from the U.S., where she has since settled, and her unsettling struggles within the rigid British class system.

An engaging childhood memoir and a deeply affectionate tribute to the author’s parents.