Available:*
Library | Call Number | Status |
|---|---|---|
Searching... Hardwood Creek Library (Forest Lake) | FICTION BER | Searching... Unknown |
Bound With These Titles
On Order
Summary
Summary
A young boy takes a trip on his own to visit his grandparents in Kentucky in this luminous entry in the acclaimed Port William series.
In this "eloquent distillation of Berry's favorite themes- the importance of family, community and respect for the land" ( Kirkus Reviews ), nine-year-old Andy Catlett embarks on a solo trip by bus to visit his grandparents in Port William, Kentucky, during the Christmas of 1943. Full of "nostalgic, admiring detail" ( Publishers Weekly ), Andy observes the modern world crowding out the old ways, and the people he encounters become touchstones for his understanding of a precious and imperiled world. This beautiful, short memoir-like novel is a perfect introduction to Wendell Berry's rich and ever-evolving saga of the Port William Membership, filled with images "as though describing a painting by Edward Hopper" ( The New York Times ).
Author Notes
Wendell Berry The prolific poet, novelist, and essayist Wendell Berry is a fifth-generation native of north central Kentucky. Berry taught at Stanford University; traveled to Italy and France on a Guggenheim Fellowship; and taught at New York University and the University of Kentucky, Lexington, before moving to Henry County.
Berry owns and operates Lanes Landing Farm, a small, hilly piece of property on the Kentucky River. He embraced full-time farming as a career, using horses and organic methods to tend the land. Harmony with nature in general, and the farming tradition in particular, is a central theme of Berry's diverse work.
As a poet, Berry gained popularity within the literary community. Collected Poems, 1957-1982, was particularly well-received. Novels and short stories set in Port William, a fictional town paralleling his real-life home town of Port Royal further established his literary reputation. The Memory of Old Jack, Berry's third novel, received Chicago's Friends of American Writers Award for 1975. Berry reached his broadest audience and attained his greatest popular acclaim through his essays. The Unsettling of America: Culture and Agriculture is a springboard for contemporary environmental concerns.
In his life as well as his art, Berry has advocated a responsible, contextual relationship with individuals in a local, agrarian economy.
(Bowker Author Biography)
Reviews (3)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Readers familiar with rural Kentucky novelist (A Place on Earth), poet (A Timbered Choir) and essayist (Another Turn of the Crank) Berry and his vast repertoire will feel right at home in this slim, memoirlike novel narrated by the elderly Andy Catlett. In the winter of 1943, at age nine, young Andy is allowed to set out alone by bus from his home in Hargrave to Port William, 10 miles away, where both his parents grew up. After coffee at the bus station (a nickel) and quick trip, he is retrieved by his grandfather Catlett's mule team, driven by longtime hired black servant, Dick Watson. Andy's observations of his grandmother's unfussy cooking and the men's work stripping tobacco in the barn is full of nostalgic, admiring detail. Dick and Andy visit Dick's wife, Aunt Sarah Jane, whose superstitions and acute perception of racial inequity "introduced the fester of it into the conscience of a small boy." At a visit to his mother's more modernized family farm, the absence of Uncle Virgil fighting overseas is grievously felt, and Andy is allowed to listen to the radio before sleeping. "The world I knew as a boy was flawed, surely," Berry writes wisely, "but it was substantial and authentic." (Jan.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Kirkus Review
This short, elegiac novel is the latest in Berry's Port William series. Port William is a fictional town in rural Kentucky. Narrator Andy Catlett is looking back, 60 years later, at his nine-year-old self enjoying his "last year of innocence" before the shocking summer of 1944 (chronicled in A World Lost, 1996). His memories encompass three days between Christmas and New Year's in 1943, when Andy embarks on his first journey alone, a ten-mile bus ride from his home in Hargrave to Port William, where both sets of grandparents live. He is met by his paternal grandfather Marce, his hired hand Dick Watson, who is black, and their mules and wagon. (Andy longs for his own mule and harness.) Marce, a tobacco farmer no longer active himself, has four employees. The Catletts do not have electricity, unlike Andy's other grandparents, the Feltners, who also own a car. The visit is uneventful. Andy is fed handsomely in both homes, despite wartime rationing. At Granddaddy Feltner's, he helps transform the tobacco barn into a sheep barn. Though the story is short on events, it is long on feeling. It amounts to an outpouring of gratitude (the novel's transcendent emotion) for the loving kindness he was shown, and the chance to have known a simpler era before it disappeared. These are good people living hard lives, but the group portrait is not saccharine. One of Grandpa Catlett's hands is a menacing loner. No excuses are made for the racism of the time, in which, as Andy will come to understand, all white people were "complicit." Memories hark back to the Civil War, "immediate as an odor." Nevertheless, the vanished Port William glows, a town content to be itself, unacquainted with modern restlessness. An eloquent distillation of Berry's favorite themes: the importance of family, community and respect for the land. Copyright ©Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
New York Review of Books Review
AROUND the time of the War of Independence, America's main contact with the Middle East consisted in trading Caribbean rum for Turkish opium. It's hard not to wish, reading the epic story of this 230-year relationship, now usefully condensed into a single well-researched volume, that things could have remained as simple as the swapping of your recreational poison for mine. But things never were quite so simple. Even then the potential for friction loomed as large as the possibility of mutual gain. Before the end of the Napoleonic wars, Christian sailors risked capture and enslavement by Muslim pirates from the Barbary ports of Algiers, Tunis and Tripoli. Governments could either front protection money, cough up ransom or threaten force. America tried all three approaches, and its erratic policy echoes with sad familiarity in the 21st century. We find the same wrangling in Washington between those who counsel appeasement (the cheaper, saner option) and those who demand armed action (the more glorious); bickering among Western capitals over whether to act singly or in concert (Thomas Jefferson tried to corral a coalition, but Congress balked); and daring strikes carried out with near-fatal clumsiness (an attempt to blockade Tripoli led to the capture, in 1803, of the U.S.S. Philadelphia and its 308-man crew, and a subsequent, heroically farcical attempt to free them by effecting regime change). Michael B. Oren, an American-born Israeli scholar and the author of a well-received study of the 1967 Arab-Israeli war, recounts such exploits with admirable detachment. "Power, Faith, and Fantasy" is hugely ambitious, drawing on hundreds of original sources to create a finely balanced overview of this enormously complex subject. Out of understandable necessity, the later chapters, dealing with more recent times and America's role as a superpower, preoccupied with a multilayered and often contradictory agenda in the Middle East, grow sketchier and less conclusive. Yet it is a diverting tale over all, full of forgotten twists and memorable characters. Who remembers now, for instance, that the Statue of Liberty was initially conceived by her French sculptor as an Egyptian peasant girl, intended to adorn the entrance to the Suez Canal? Or that the first Zionists to settle in Palestine were in fact American Protestants, who planted successive, ill-fated colonies aimed at "restoring" the Holy Land to Jews, so that their subsequent conversion to Christianity would speed the Second Coming? Or that Civil War veterans officered Egyptian campaigns in Sudan and Abyssinia? Or that before landing in North Africa during World War II, the United States Army dropped leaflets advertising the arrival of "Holy Warriors ... to fight the great jihad of freedom"? President Richard Nixon, Secretary of State Henry Kissinger and King Faisal of Saudi Arabia in Jidda, June 1974. Some of these episodes may sound trivial or obscure, but Oren cleverly weaves them into the overarching themes of his title. Consider America's missionary effort. The printing of native-language Bibles, and the founding of schools, clinics and three universities, in Cairo, Beirut and Istanbul, that remain among the best in the region, failed to win more than a trickle of converts. Yet a hundred years of American mission work produced some unexpected change. It was, in part, the missionary doctors' reputation for altruism that persuaded the Saudi king to offer his oil patch not to British, but to American prospectors. And while the proto-Zionist restorationist movement faded to the fringes of Protestant preaching - at least, until its revival by some modern evangelicals - a sentimental attachment to the ancient Hebrews infused the religious upbringing of Harry Truman and Lyndon Johnson, the two presidents who did most to cement American ties with Israel. Such underlying trends have seldom been so well explored, but Oren occasionally overstates their importance. Truman's own words reveal that "faith" was perhaps a secondary motive behind his crucial decision to back the creation of Israel. "I have to answer to hundreds of thousands who are anxious for the success of Zionism," Oren quotes Truman as explaining. "I do not have hundreds of thousands of Arabs in my constituents." Important context is missing from some of the book's pages. Oren artfully touches on Middle Eastern influence on American popular culture, from the hootchy-kootchy dance to Camel cigarettes, but tends to dissociate this from the wider Western tradition of Orientalism. There is much gory detail about the Armenian genocide, but scant mention of the fact that Ottoman Turkey faced repeated invasion by a Russia whose czars, disastrously for the Ottomans' Armenian subjects, claimed leadership of all Orthodox Christians. At several junctures, Oren paints Europe as stubbornly resistant to American policy, without adequately substantiating the charge or explaining European motives. We hear nothing of how America's fateful, post-World War I decision to restrict immigration helped push desperate Jewish refugees toward Palestine. While correctly noting the peculiar mix of cultural disdain and romantic fascination that has marked American attitudes to Muslim Middle Easterners, Oren curiously declines to distance himself from some unflattering views. We hear, for instance, of an 18th-century diplomat whose "experience had taught him that in the Middle East power alone was respected," as if this were a quality unique to the region. And a hint of distaste sometimes infuses his language. The landmass of the Middle East curves "scimitar-like through Arabia." Elsewhere, Oren speaks blithely of "nameless Middle Eastern thugs" and "the ubiquity of Arab terror." Such shopworn phrases tend to compound, rather than dispel, preconceived notions of the Middle East as a kind of unfathomable Badland. Commendably, in a work of such scope, there are very few errors of fact or omission. Yet, as a reserve major in the Israeli Army, Oren ought to know that Israel's 1982 invasion of Lebanon was not provoked by the P.L.O. "regularly striking" at Galilee. Yasir Arafat's group was certainly an elemental threat to the Jewish state, but had actually been observing a long, American-brokered cease-fire before Ariel Sharon's drive to Beirut. It is also odd that the author hardly touches upon the influence of the pro-Israel lobby, or on the issue of United States financial and military aid to Israel, factors undeniably crucial to any understanding of America's involvement with today's Middle East. Oren mostly avoids the temptation to seek historical parallels to modern events. The occasions when he succumbs reveal the peril for historians of this habit. Toward the book's conclusion, for instance, he avers that "by protecting themselves from Middle Eastern threats while simultaneously trying to assist native people, U.S. forces in Iraq were, in effect, revisiting the earliest American involvement in the region." Surely, as we now know, the threat to America posed by Saddam Hussein's Iraq was more fantastical than real, until, that is, American forces hit the ground there. Such subtle reinforcement of America's self-image as an innocent among Middle Eastern sharks mars an otherwise exemplary work. This is a pity, since, as Oren amply illustrates, it is America's failure to be clear and honest about its own motives, as much as its serial failure to interpret the Middle East, that has so often befuddled relations with the region. Who remembers that the Statue of Liberty was originally meant to adorn the entrance of the Suez Canal? Max Rodenbeck is the Middle East correspondent for The Economist.
