A Childhood:The Biography of a Place, and: All Over but the Shoutin', and: The Circle of Hanh (review)

Reviews Reader-to-Reader: Capsule Reviews This column invites readers to share theirfavorite nonfiction books in print. Memoirs, travel writing, nature writing, essay coUections, biography, adventure stories—all are welcome here as mini-reviews of new books and oldfavorites that are still available. Our aim is to keep the best of nonfiction alive in a reader-to-reader kind ofway. Mimi Schwartz, "Reader-to-Reader" Editor1 Dinty W. Moore You might expect the memoir of growing up in hard times to be dead by now; it has certainly been done, and done again, and again, by repeated writers , in repeated ways. But two recent memoirs and a classic reissue remind us that a youth of poverty, fear, and violence, when written about honestly, remains relevant to readers—perhaps because so many of us stül recognize ourselves in such work. A Childhood:The Biography ofa Place, by Harry Crews. University ofGeorgia Press (hardcover, reissue), 1995. 182 pages, $24.95. Crews, the novelist, grew up during the Great Depression among sharecroppers in rural southern Georgia. His memoir of grinding poverty contains magic, brutality, and a riveting voice. "Write hard and clear about what hurts," Hemingway once said, and Crews's writing embodies that dictum. 1If you would like submission guidelines for this column, contact Mimi Schwartz at schwartm@stockton.edu or c/o Writing Program, Richard Stockton College of New Jersey, Jim Leeds Road, Pomona, NJ 08240. 261 262Fourth Genre Nothing comes easy to this author's people; what Uttle they have, they hold by a thread, and when disaster faUs, it faUs brutally. At age five, Harry Crews takes a fever and his legs curl up behind him, locked into place; one year later, his legs inexplicably healed, he mistakenly tumbles into a vat of scalding water meant to loosen the skin from butchered hogs. His survival, this books teUs us, is a miracle. His survival to become a such a fine writer is something else again. Crews skirted the uneasy edges of creative nonfiction way back in 1978. Listen to his opening sentence: My first memory is of ten years before I was born, and the memory takes place where I have never been and involves my daddy whom I never knew. I had the honor ofmeeting Crews in 1990, and he told me thenjust how difficult writing A Childhood had been for him. "There were a lot of places in that book where I simply could not write, type, use a pencil, or anything. I didn't know what to do, but I was going to write it one way or another. So what I did was I got a tape recorder and would go into a room and make it as dark as I could, a lot oftimes at night, when it was really black, and lie down, and just talk into a microphone." The result is an amazing book. All Over but the Shoutin', by Rick Bragg.Vintage (paperback), 1998. 329 pages, $14.00. Like Crews, Bragg grew up in the hardscrabble south, and his memoir chronicles how he traveled from a mountain corner ofAlabama where it was "common, acceptable, not to be able to read, but a man who wouldn't fight, couldn't fight, was a pathetic thing," to become a Pulitzer Prize—winning correspondent for the NewYork Times. His mother figures prominently in his survival; she is the hero. His father, an alcoholic, is no hero at all, but Bragg is perhaps most eloquent when he looks hard and clear at the father's experiences in the Korean War and the sadness and crisis that shaped the man. Of Korea, and his father, Bragg writes: ". . .in that wretched place where the ground blows up under your feet and dead men motion to you from the sidefines of war, a boy with thin blood was rearranged." Book Previews263 The Circle of Hanh, by Bruce Weigl. Grove Press (hardcover), 2000. 205 pages, $24.00. Weigl, better known as a poet than a writer ofprose, grew up poor in Ohio, not the south, but the themes are aU there—poverty, shame, violence. He would probably agree with Bragg about war and how it rearranges a boy...