by Lawn Griffiths ‧ RELEASE DATE: May 29, 2015
An affectionate but facile look at family farm life.
A debut collection of vignettes about the author’s childhood on an Iowa farm.
Between 1900 and 1990, the number of Americans who lived on family farms declined from 42 percent of the population to less than 2 percent. Newspaper reporter Griffiths grew up on such a farm near Parkersburg, Iowa, in the 1950s and ’60s, and this is an affectionate, if impersonal, elegy for a vanishing way of life. “Rural America,” he notes, “has been as transformed by science and technology as other sectors of our nation.” Griffiths lovingly details almost every aspect of the dairy farming, corn growing, and hog raising to which he was exposed, starting at age 4 when he rode a cultivator plowing through a cornfield. “My father believed all children had work potential, no matter how young they were,” he recalls. “Play was okay for town kids, he’d say, but country youth had to learn responsibility.” Griffiths’ responsibilities included everything from filling silos with corn to spraying cows and protecting them from flies to transplanting “protesting pullets” from brooder houses to wire cages: “Like chicken thieves, we stole [in] just after darkness and began the resettlement project.” The author’s collage of country life includes recollections of the schoolhouse he attended in second grade—“Older boys used to capture mice in traps and dangle the partly paralyzed rodents in the faces of girls”—and the local drugstore, where “the stools and booths around the soda fountain were filled with teenagers sipping green rivers and cherry cokes.” Still, this is a somewhat one-dimensional piece of Americana because he reveals so little about the people in his rural world. There is an amusing anecdote about his mother being cornered in an outhouse by an “ill-tempered ram,” but as for her personality, he simply says that she was “practical, unassuming, modest and enduring.” Only the local blacksmith—a “peppery, strong-willed, broad-shouldered and tireless” man who “developed welding into an art”—gets a fleshed-out portrait. Griffiths’ vignettes may have worked for his newspaper columns on farming but, without the human touch, are less effective as a book.
An affectionate but facile look at family farm life.Pub Date: May 29, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-5035-7284-3
Page Count: 150
Publisher: Xlibris
Review Posted Online: Aug. 4, 2015
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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by Chris Gardner with Quincy Troupe ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 1, 2006
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
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by Jon Krakauer ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 1, 1996
A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
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