It's like "The Devil All the Time" only it takes place in childhood. I grew up on a farm and I've seen pigs castrated and vets stick their arms all the way into a cow to pull a calf. I ran a chicken over with a lawn mower acidentally and ot was heartwrenching and saw one run away with its head cut off when my Mom was butchering.
I've seen dogs get run over by cars and I've killed mice with baseball bats. I'm not proud of it. This w Really 1 star bumped up to 2. This was just accepted as part of my growing up. Just as such experiences were part of Crews childhood. However my childhood didn't contain violent and drunken parents or the expectation that boys would "do it" to girls while still children.
Much less when inspired by fire and brimstone preaching. My jaw just drops at the number of readers who love these stories. I've even seen it on top ten southern literature lists. It's just a bunch of stomach churning stories from a boy's early childhood - including theft, sex and watching a man stab himself to death. What really brings the book down for me was that it just sort of ended with about one page of adulthood.
No summation or reflection. Only statements at the beginning saying he didn't remember many many of these things happening but heard them from others. But some are obviously his own memories and they are creepy and without conscience.
Maybe he never did. Absolutely cannot recommend this book. I bump it up to two stars because he wasn't stupid and CAN tell a story. Just not in a way that I wish to promote.
View all 8 comments. Mar 04, Kirk Smith rated it it was amazing Shelves: southern-literature. When I was a child, my Grandfather often drove me by some tenants on one of his rural properties that he said made the Best Possum and Sweet Potatoes. Well some how we never quite visited at the right time and never got around to having dinner with them. I was pretty happy about it then and that will never change. But the Recipe for Possum is here in this book!
There is also a lot of other farming knowledge about rendering hogs, or breeding mules. It is rural wisdom passed along collectively by When I was a child, my Grandfather often drove me by some tenants on one of his rural properties that he said made the Best Possum and Sweet Potatoes. It is rural wisdom passed along collectively by way of storytelling.
I would call this book one part memoir and one part fiction, but still chock full of real recipes for just surviving. The time and place would have been nearer my fathers generation than mine, but I appreciate how much just sensible knowledge is being passed along here. Harry Crews suffered two back to back tragedies in this memoir, and I appreciated how gracefully he covered the material, knowing that it must have been difficult to re-live.
A wonderful book to own. May deserve to be read again someday. View all 11 comments. Nov 18, Laura rated it liked it. The New York Times said this was the best memoir ever written, and I wanted to love it but I just couldn't. It was engrossing and vividly written, but there was so much gruesomely-detailed violence against children and animals that it was painful to read.
It transformed all of my romantic ideas about idyllic life on a farm. The farm of Crews' childhood was a bloody, abusive place. Oct 28, Kathy rated it really liked it Recommends it for: cracker-philiacs. Shelves: southern-lit , cracker-culture. My Mom was born just five years earlier than Harry Crews into a farming community, in Gilchrist County, Florida - much like the home that Crews describes in his "biography of a place".
So, as I read, I felt that I was learning more about the folks whose blood runs through my veins, as well as about a fantastically interesting author, Mr. The bulk of his story centers around the year that he wa Both my Mother and Father's people migrated to Georgia from South Carolina and then into Florida. The bulk of his story centers around the year that he was five. A tough year for him, to say the least. He becomes aware of himself, is paralyzed by polio, boiled, and forced to leave his home in the night to escape his step-father's violence.
Worst of all, he has to move to Jacksonville. I thought I would laugh, or maybe cry, when his Mother said to him as they were leaving home in the night, "Want in one hand and shit in the other, see which one fills up fastest. I have a colorful collection of my Father's "words of wisdom' - including that old nugget, " you ain't got sense enough to pour piss out of a boot".
For some reason, folks like mine speak in analogies, much like speaking in tounges to those unfamiliar. My favorite line is when he describe his childhood world as one "in which survival depended on raw courage, a courage born out of desperation and sustained by a lack of alternatives". Aug 26, Max McNabb rated it really liked it. Harry Crews begins his memoir of childhood in rural, s Georgia with the tale of his father's nasty case of VD.
It just gets grittier from there, trust me. The book covers only the first six years of Crews's life, but reads like an epic of physical, psychological, and spiritual extremes. Crews is brutal in his honesty. The most memorable sequence of the book starts with young Crews holding blackbirds captive in a spare room of the family house. Soon after, the boy was stricken with a strange paralysis. Doctors told him he'd never walk again. An elderly ex-slave and "conjure woman" named Auntie cared for the sickly Crews.
She told him he had become ill because one of the trapped birds had spit in his mouth. Terrified, Crews had the birds freed--and then his gradual recovery began. Mar 03, Richard Gilbert rated it it was amazing. I loved Harry Crews's ability to write both from his boy's point of view and from his adult's. He grew up in south Georgia in a dirt-poor sharecropper family.
Their poverty and ignorance were almost unbelievable. But their world also was full of love and magic, along with what you'd expect—alcoholism and domestic violence. Crews was attuned to the nature that surrounded him and took for granted his parents' fights over his father's drinking, his close relationship with a black tenant family on t I loved Harry Crews's ability to write both from his boy's point of view and from his adult's.
Crews was attuned to the nature that surrounded him and took for granted his parents' fights over his father's drinking, his close relationship with a black tenant family on the farm, and everyone around him being poor, illiterate, and marked or maimed by physical labor, accidents, and animals.
The father in the book is actually Crews's stepfather. After Crews's father died, when he was about two, his brother divorced his wife and married Crews's mother. He was a loving father to Crews and his brother, but he grew increasingly drunk and absent.
Life on the farm was incredibly hard, but as I said, magical for young Harry. Then he was briefly and painfully crippled by polio at about age five and then horribly burned when he fell into scalding water at a hog butchering. During both protracted recoveries he was cared for at night by his best friend's grandmother, an elderly black woman who told him outlandish tales that reflected her magical understanding of the world.
Even amidst a rich storytelling culture, in which stories immortalized, explained, and helped people endure an unforgiving and often desperate life, Auntie stood out. Her tales, which emphasized unknowable power and mystery and the importance of protective rituals, didn't provide comprehension of phenomena but a way to live with them. Crews learned well—what a fine storyteller is riveting our attention on his life from ages five to about 10, with a flash forward at the end.
The tone that Crews creates and his sentence rhythms made this an intoxicating read for me, and the story is compelling—you really want to find out what happens. He conveys his experiences through his childhood point of view, and often in vivid scenes, but using the strong storyteller's voice of an older, wiser, sadder man looking back. Though Crews only occasionally employs an overt address—a direct aside in his adult writer's voice—his layering of both childhood and adult perspectives imbues the memoir with depth.
We grasp more than he did then, even as we enjoy his childhood innocence and originality. Despite the brutality and harshness of his world, I could not help but envy aspects of its cohesion, which sets up a reader to be unexpectedly moved by Crews's ultimate plight.
Dec 10, Jason rated it it was amazing. Harry Crews has been a remarkable discovery for me. A delayed discovery. His fiction is wry but cruel, because the world he knew was cruel, and a man has to remain somewhat stoic in the face of all the violence and madness that color his world, unless he wants to go mad or dissipate. A Childhood traces the genealogy of a particular outlook back into early childhood.
The book is pr Harry Crews has been a remarkable discovery for me. Much of what Crews experienced - poverty, infirmity, wreckage, and loss - was painful and unpleasant, but all of it is part of the thread of his development. There is a sense of reverence for Bacon County, Georgia and its inhabitants human and animal. If this is a biography of a place, it is the biography of a place as reflected through the experiences of a child - a child who would grow up to become a writer and a perennial outsider.
We must own our origins and in part be owned by them. Both my parents grew up poor on the prairie. I spent a lot of time on my grandparents' farm as a child.
Though I feel myself uniquely equipped to embrace Crews' book, it is essentially for anybody who grew up and moved on While the book is of quasi-anthropological interest, its scope is ultimately as universal as it gets.
May 28, Jeanette rated it really liked it. Its prose and authentic language just first rate. There are some phrases that say more in less than 20 words than entire pages of eloquent studied verbiage. I'm not one. It has more in common with the millennia of homo sapiens past, than our present culture. Loved it! Harry Crews could write. Oct 06, Carrie Schindele Cupples rated it it was amazing Shelves: literature , favorites.
There are so many amazing, memorable, filthy moments in this book that I don't know where to start. If you like to read Harry Crews, this book will feel even better than his fiction. It would be easy to focus the tale only on the events Crews lives through, but it is the local color of his family and neighbors that make this the richest story I've read in ages. I read the passage about slaughtering hogs and his mama making soap about ten times. My bet is that anyone who reads this will have favo There are so many amazing, memorable, filthy moments in this book that I don't know where to start.
My bet is that anyone who reads this will have favorite parts that they will think on time and again. Jul 13, Melody rated it really liked it Shelves: on-the-southern-literary-trail. As I was reading this book, listening to the cadence and the voice of the author, it dawned on me that I had seen him before. Some time ago we watched a film Called Searching for the Wrong-eyed Jesus and I couldn't get it out of my head that the author who told some grisly tales of the south featured in the film had to be Harry Crews.
Sure was! If we can find a working VHS player we'll rewatch the film. You have to bury your possum head the right way or he'll find you and get possum revenge As I was reading this book, listening to the cadence and the voice of the author, it dawned on me that I had seen him before.
You have to bury your possum head the right way or he'll find you and get possum revenge. Nov 04, Keith Alverson rated it it was amazing. This was a really excellent view into the life of poor farmers in southern Georgia in the s and 30s.
Great writing and sense of community, time and place. I suppose some of the major events are real events from the author's childhood like getting polio, and falling in a vat of boiling water , but given the book mostly takes place when the author was five years old, the real detail must all be invented. Thus, calling it a non-fiction memoir would be quite a stretch. More of a biography of a This was a really excellent view into the life of poor farmers in southern Georgia in the s and 30s.
More of a biography of a time and place. I suppose this is a reason it is so titled. Wonderful read. Dec 04, Gary rated it it was amazing Shelves: biography , non-fiction. Harry Crews always does a number on me, and especially so with this autobiographical account of his childhood.
I grew up in the South when it still resembled the South of Crews' time. The folks and places he describes with his unique, vivid style are my people and my home. Somehow Southerners seem to love harder and deeper, and Crews captures this so well in this book, it often made me read sections over again, moving me to tears, sometimes from happiness, sometimes from pain.
This is a magnific Harry Crews always does a number on me, and especially so with this autobiographical account of his childhood. This is a magnificent piece of art. Aug 04, Julie rated it really liked it. This is a story about author Harry Crews first six years of his life with a preamble about his biological father.
Hardscrabble is the best way to describe the life of his people clawing out an existence in rural Georgia. Add another edition? A childhood, the biography of a place Harry Crews. Donate this book to the Internet Archive library.
If you own this book, you can mail it to our address below. Borrow Listen. Want to Read. Download for print-disabled. Check nearby libraries Library. Share this book Facebook. Last edited by ImportBot. August 18, History. An edition of A childhood, the biography of a place This edition was published in by G.
Hall in Boston. Written in English — pages. How did the son of an alcoholic sharecropper become a writer? He lied about his age and joined the Marines. When his days as a Marine were over he sent himself to college on the GI Bill.
Put that in your pipe and smoke it you holders of Masters of Fine arts in Creative Writing. He writes about growing up poor in Bacon County, Georgia. He writes about falling into a boiling cauldron of water during hog killing time.
He writes about a year spent in bed, paralyzed by what was probably polio. He writes of growing up with the children of field hands. The one joy in his impoverished life was the Sears Roebuck catalog.
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