- Hardcover: 192 pages
- Publisher: University of Georgia Press; New edition edition (Oct 1 1995)
- Language: English
- ISBN-10: 0820317594
- ISBN-13: 978-0820317595
- Product Dimensions: 23.6 x 16.2 x 1.9 cm
- Shipping Weight: 490 g
- Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars See all reviews (6 customer reviews)
- Amazon Bestsellers Rank: #343,760 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
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Product Details |
Product Description
Review
"Crews is, obviously, a unique southern raconteur. . . . It's easy to despise poor folks. A Childhood makes it more difficult. It raises almost to a level of heroism these people who seem of a different century. A Childhood is not about a forgotten America, it is about a part of America that has rarely, except in books like this, been properly discovered."--New York Times Book Review
"It is Crews' great gift that he can show us how absolutely cursed, and alsolutely beautiful, we are. . . . Crews burns through the easy ways in which we would like to regard ourselves; what he leaves behind is something better, something touched by the refiner's fire.”--New York Newsday
Product Description
A Childhood is the unforgettable memoir of Harry Crews' earliest years, a sharply remembered portrait of the people, locales, and circumstances that shaped him--and destined him to be a storyteller. Crews was born in the middle of the Great Depression, in a one-room sharecropper's cabin at the end of a dirt road in rural South Georgia. If Bacon County was a place of grinding poverty, poor soil, and blood feuds, it was also a deeply mystical place, where snakes talked, birds could possess a small boy by spitting in his mouth, and faith healers and conjure women kept ghosts and devils at bay.
At once shocking and elegiac, heartrending and comical, A Childhood not only recalls the transforming events of Crews's youth but conveys his growing sense of self in a world "in which survival depended on raw courage, a courage born out of desperation and sustained by a lack of alternatives."
Amid portraits of relatives and neighbors, Bacon County lore, and details of farm life, Crews tells of his father's death; his friendship with Willalee Bookatee, the son of a black hired hand; his bout with polio; his mother and stepfather's failing marriage; his near-fatal scalding at a hog-killing; and a five-month sojourn in Jacksonville, Florida. These and other memories define, with reverence and affection, Harry Crews's childhood world: "its people and its customs and all its loveliness and all its ugliness." Imaginative and gripping, A Childhood re-creates in detail one writer's search for past and self, a search for a time and place lost forever except in memory.
Inside This Book
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First Sentence
MY FIRST MEMORY is of a time ten years before I was born, and the memory takes place where I have never been and involves my daddy whom I never knew. Read the first page
Front Cover | Copyright | Excerpt | Back Cover
MY FIRST MEMORY is of a time ten years before I was born, and the memory takes place where I have never been and involves my daddy whom I never knew. Read the first page
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Concordance
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Front Cover | Copyright | Excerpt | Back Cover
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Most helpful customer reviews
5.0 out of 5 stars
A Childhood: The Biography of a Place,
By Timothy Jason Lowery (Carrollton, Georgia United States) - See all my reviews
This review is from: A Childhood: The Biography of a Place (Hardcover)
I would suggest this book to anyone who has ever read anything published by Harry Crews; specifically to those who haven't read anything by him, but who are interested in this magnificent author. After reading it, I found myself wondering how Crews was able to escape childhood, much less become of the the greatest Southern authors since Faulkner. Truly a fantastic book that will stand the test of time and inevitably cast Crews as one of the greatest authors of the 20th century!
5.0 out of 5 stars
A must read for Yankees and children of the south alike,
By A Customer
This review is from: A Childhood: The Biography of a Place (Hardcover)
I was assigned this book in a tutorial class on the "mind of the south" by a professor during my senior year of college. I was immediately drawn to the author's experiences with tenant farming; being the son of a mother whose own father was a farmer that oversaw several tenents to his own farming operation prior to, and shortly after WWII. Crew's accurate depection of tenant farmer life was valididated, to this reader at least, by his portrayal of an agricultural system that was difficult to not only rural agricultural African Americans, but their white supervisors. Crews has done a wonderful job of incorporating the distinctly southern phrases and dialogue of the rural, agrarian south. I though my own mother was the only person who pronounced "hurricane" as "harrakin". Charachters such as Willalee Bookatee and his family were strikingly similar to those poor blacks, and whites, described in my mother's stories of working in the tobacco fields of rural NC. This book will shed some much needed light on the fact that the hard-core, rural south is not so far removed from the remodeled "New South".
5.0 out of 5 stars
Harry Crews' Materpiece,
By
This review is from: A Childhood: The Biography of a Place (Hardcover)
Although this book is not a typical work by the literate master of the hard South, it is a testament to his talent. This book made me see and feel the life of a 6 year old dirt farmer in Bacon Co, Georgia, and also give some insight into the basis of characters in Crews' fictional works. This is one of the best quasi-memoirs ever written, and even has a slight belief in human goodness not seen in his other work. Mr. Crews' more typical works (such as Feast of Snakes or All We Need of Hell) are very good novels in their own right, yet Childhood stands apart and above all of his other books combined. If you read nothing else by Harry Crews (which is not a good idea--you should read many of his books), this is the one to choose.
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