Leaning Into the Wind: Memoirs of an Immigrant Prairie Farm Boy [Paperback]

This review is a long time coming. I read the book over a year ago and I was incredibly and pleasantly surprised by it.

But first a disclaimer: The author, Larry Jacobsen, is my father in law.
But let me clarify that our relationship in no way affects my opinion on the book. If anything, as it is unfortunately the case with relatives' work, whom we can never quite appreciate as we do strangers, I approached reading this book with a negative bias.

I opened the book with my mind already made that it was going to be a somewhat boring read, an indulgence of a man nearing the end of his life journey and that it was not probably going to be the greatest literary experience of my life.

I was wrong. Dead wrong.

While the writing style is indeed a bit folksy and a little less polished than a NY Times reader might expect, it is more than adequate and easy to read. In fact, as all good writing should do, it quickly fades away in favor of the story itself.

The book starts a bit slowly. We are treated to farming life in an era that seems as far away as the Punic wars. Not a fast paced subject under any circumstance.
But once past the first few pages we are treated to a completely engaging account of this man life story and the cast of characters that have accompanied him throughout his life journey.

The countryside, the towns and life in the mines take on a quality and texture that reminded me at times of folk art paintings, with their bold colors and strong lines. At other times it was more like reading a watercolor landscape. One where the quiet countryside was populated by burly men in stained overalls and faces black from soot.

In this book, which is labeled as an autobiography, Larry eventually almost fades from the story and becomes an observer of his surroundings and the people populating them. That's when the book reaches its best part and we get to know and experience life in small mining towns.

And characters they are: one after the other they pass through, all in search of a better life and all, unbelievably, trying to find it in a deep dark hole in the ground. But as we descend in the bowels of the earth with these men (I don't believe there were many women miners at the time) we get to know them and appreciate them better, until we almost start to understand their fascination with their job.

Beside meeting all these incredibly sculpted characters, including Larry himself, one of the most enjoyable topics in the book is the mining technology Larry describes so vividly. If you are a mining buff, this book is for you. If you aren't, there is plenty more to engage even the most disinterested of readers.

"I really enjoyed this autobiography of the son of impoverished Danish
immigrants trying to wrest a living from a small farm in the uppermost
Columbia Valley in the Canadian Rockies. Then a bold move onto a
prairie farm in wind-swept southeastern Alberta. Larry Jacobsen
recounts many interesting events of his boyhood in both locales. But
when he was old enough he left the baldheaded prairies to go back into
the mountains, literally, as a miner in British Columbia and the
Yukon. He writes very knowledgeably about the fascinating jobs and
people he enountered. An enjoyable autobiography, well illustrated. I
personally knew Larry as a boy in B.C., but we haven't seen each other
for about 65 years. Recommended."

› Go to Amazon.com to see both reviews  4.0 out of 5 stars