5 comments about Packinghouse Daughter: A Memoir.

1. Wilson's was a remarkable presence in a town that that has never gotten over the loss of the high-pay meatpacking firm. Ms. Register wrote a fine and noteworthy account of a company town in rural America. My grandfather worked there for many years chasing cattle up a four-story ramp to the 'kill.' My father worked in the freezers after WWII and my uncle spent many years as a meatcutter. I worked there one summer as did many of my friends and it defined the baseline economics of the union town and it defined what drugery and workplace injuries were all about before we even knew the term carpal tunnel. Beyond working there I witnessed the impact of the strike in 1959. As a nine-year old I used to walk down the railroad tracks to the plant entrance and watch the rocks being thrown, cars being vandalized and anger controlled only by the National Guard. One of my friend's fathers crossed the picket line to work. He like other 'scabs' were labelled and treated as such for decades to come.
   
   Ms. Register digs deeper into Albert Lea's labor past and unbeknownst to me identified an aunt as a striker at the local Woolworth's. The effort of the local union to interject itself into other businesses defined the patrons that businesses would have (another relative who refused to unionize his small retail business found himself boycotted) and the success or failure to follow.
   
   I'm surprised this has not been picked up as a movie. Worth the read.



2. I don't much like memoirs. But Packinghouse Daughter, by Cheri Register, is not a typical memoir. It is enchanting, disturbing, and provocative. It should be read by a wide range of readers, including academics and other middle-class professionals who pride themselves on "siding with the working class." It shatters some of our illusions and our tendency to romanticize our identification with working-class people even as it encourages us to hold fast to our principles. The book should also be read by the countless working-class parents who worked hard to give their children the life they knew they could never have. Speaking for those children, this book says eloquently: we honor you, our parents, for your commitments and principles and will try to carry those into our very different worlds. As a bonus, the book's author tells her story so well, with a disarming openness about her conflicted emotions and with such humor and earthy but deep insight, that it will be accessible even to those who don't read much.

   Register tells a story of growing up in the 1950s as the daughter of a longtime employee of the Wilson meatpacking plant in Albert Lea, Minnesota, not far from the more famous (and, in her account, more favored) Hormel plant in Austin. Coming-of-age memoirs now flood the market with stories that cater to our need for a revised Horatio Alger myth. In countless stories--many of them moving, important stories for our time--children grow up suffering from unspeakable poverty, abusive or otherwise dysfunctional families, or racism, but somehow survive and overcome those conditions to become not wealthy business moguls but their equivalent in our politically correct age: writers or academics who speak out against poverty, violence, and racism. Despite some similarities, this memoir is different. Register acknowledges gratefully that her parents provided an emotionally and economically secure environment for her, while educating her about her place in a world with more complicated class divisions than we see in most popular memoirs. It is, in part, her more subtle account of those divisions that makes her story so compelling.

   Make no mistake about it: this is a one-sided story. Register's father is a loyal union man, and she is loyal to the union line, too, especially in telling the story of a particularly divisive labor dispute in 1959. But even when she makes it clear where she believes justice and unfairness lie, she complicates the story in ways that enrich our understanding rather than feed our prejudices.

   I grew up in rural Ohio only slightly later than Register, the son of a small-town midwestern merchant in a solidly middle-class family with undoubtedly less disposable income than Register's. My father, like many of Albert Lea's merchants, resented the unions that secured better wages for the workers in the nearby General Motors plant than he thought he could afford to pay his loyal, hard-working employees--some of whom earned more than he did. That experience has always made me suspicious of class-based analyses of rural and small-town life. But Register's subtle class analysis of life in mid-century Albert Lea rings true even to my suspicious ears.

   It also rings true because Register does not rely on memory alone. She consulted contemporary sources and interviewed a wide range of informants-balancing her interview with the union president by her interview and sympathetic portrayal of the plant manager, for example. Register knows what memories--hers and her informants--are good for. They convey the sentiment of the times. In that sense her account is sentimental in the best sense of that word. Her language is so vivid and her memories so fine-tuned that we feel we are walking the streets of Albert Lea with her, encountering mid-century sights and sounds that conjure up our own memories. But she knows enough not to trust memories when they become nostalgic, and she walks that fine line with a fine sense of balance.

   Register also manages to succeed where many memoirists try but fail: though cast as a memoir, this book feels like it is more about the times than it is about her. Packinghouse Daughter is an eloquent and fitting tribute to the working-class lives of The Greatest Generation.




3. I first found out about this book in an article in the Rochester newspaper about the Minnesota Historical Society Press. Since then, I have purchased several of their books. *Packinghouse Daughter* won the American Book Award and the Minnesota Book Award for autobiography, and it deserved both prizes heartily! This book is full of interesting people, class struggle, a young woman coming of age, and old-fashioned Midwestern life. If you hate those whiney memoirs about bad childhoods then this is the perfect antidote.

   I would also recommend Steven R. Hoffbeck's *The Haymakers,* which won the Minnesota Book Award for history, and Peter Razor's *While the Locust Slept,* which deserves to win every award out there--both from the Historical Society. These books, like Register's, are good stories concerned with how ordinary people get by and sometimes make an important impact on our culture. These heartfelt books should be read by Americans everywhere and should be the standard for all publishers to meet.




4. Even if you are not from the midwest or know nothing about the meat packing business this book will give you much to think about. Cheri has a way of bringing you into her experiences.



5. This book -- personal and warm -- is an extraordinary gift to kids of working-class parents. Cheri Register says things that I felt about my own dad and about my own home town, but that I was never able to say to him. She shows how what we do for a "living" is really central to shaping who we are in the bigger world. Thank you for this book!

1 comments about Germs: A Memoir Of Childhood.

1. This memoir set in pre-World War II England has many very well written passages that nicely evoke a bygone era. It is centered on Professor Wollheim's recollections and introspections on his emotional start to life. With his sexual identity up in the air, being a social zero, and faced with irrational fears at every turn, this was not a blissfully happy childhood. Dr. Freud would have had a field day with this raw material of a life.

1 comments about Popcorn Poppin' on the Apricot Tree.

1. This was a book I didn't want to put down until I had finished it. Faith has a way of "weaving a tale" and I was fascinated by her true stories and antics of Anne Peters and her siblings. A book to be enjoyed by both adults and children!
   Sincerely,
   Gloria

1 comments about The Unknown Bobby Fischer.

1. This book isn`t only about Fischer. It contains many stories about Fischer and other players. It contains many games of Fischer, but also games between other players. It contains pictures of Fischer and other players too. What i especially loved about this book was the stories, about Fischer and other players. It contains many games from Fischer`s 64 simul tour of the US, and quite a few stories from these simuls. It contains articles and other things. " A Bookstore in Argentina " was quite intriguing, but as was other stories and stuff. It also contains letters from Fischer to Larry Evans in the 70s. It is all in all a great book about chess. It isn`t a teaching book, but many stories about players in the 50s,60s and 70s. Combined with interwievs, pictures and other stuff. Many games are included, and in a sense i do believe we can all learn something from these games...you know what i mean when i say it isn`t a teaching book. This book is a true treasure, and while i admit i regret buying mnay of the books i own this one is great.
   It`s ashame it`s currently out of print, especially since it is a newer book ( 1999 ). If new copies arrive, or you see it in a used book-store grab it and never let go!!

5 comments about The Division Street Princess: A Memoir.

1. I have to echo all the other five star reviews here, added by Soloways or not. This is a well-written, engaging, moving story of a child's life growing up in Chicago. I read it in one gulp.



2. I read Divison Street Princess and loved every page. SOloway writes wonderfully, and evokes a certain America magically, she has created a very important memoir.
   
   I feel the book is so important in Americana culture and Jewish-Americana cultural archives, that the book should eventually be entered onto an online Internet site, free of charge, so that readers in the future, and I mean the FUTURE, like 500 years from now, can also read this moving memoir! Also, this would make a great movie in the Barry Levinson vein of Hollywoodiana. The murder of the little girl and the arrest of the murderer would make a fantastic 1950s Chicago movie story, with Soloway's memoir bookending the movie on both sides.



3. I was drawn into this wonderful book by the details of daily life in 1942 as seen, in the first pages, through the eyes of a four-year-old child. And I stayed with delight to absorb that little girl's increasingly acute awareness of family, friends, neighbors, and the urban neighborhood itself, as she grew into her early teens. The way in which the reader comes to know and ultimately care deeply about the parents, Min and Irv Shapiro, and the future of the family is especially satisfying. While the time and the place are unique, I believe that everyone of any age will find something familiar in this lovely memoir.



4. Author Elaine Soloway remembers Chicago in the 'forties as the best of times and the worst of times. Now in her sixties, she presents an unvarnished, microscopically precise yet warm and loving account of growing up in a supportive Jewish family above her family owned mom and pop grocery story in Chicago's Humboldt Park.
   
   The author remembers/reconstructs every detail--how her parents, aunts, uncles, cousins, and neighbors spoke, dressed, worried, loved, and argued--as the world of their Jewish enclave was dissolved by the drip, drip, drip of postwar mobility. She notes, "Television, suburban backyards, and supermarkets were draining our close-knit block of its friendliness, its familiarity."
   
   Soloway's excellently written account will bring back the past for those of us who shared the same time and place. For those who did not, it will serve as a valued lesson on how we got from Chicago in the 'forties to the Chicago of today and what we gained and at what cost.
   
   --Lowell Streiker
   author of The Old Neighborhood: Memories of a Chicago Childhood--1942 to 1952.



5. The book brought back so many memories from the old neichborhood. It is a good book for all ages.

3 comments about Of Men and Mountains.

1. Author: Douglas, William O. (William Orville), 1898-
   Title: Of men and mountains.
   Edition: [1st ed.]
   Publisher: New York, Harpers [1950]
   Edition Date: 1950
   Language: English
   Notes: Autobiographical.
   Physical Details: xiv, 333 p. maps (on lining papers) port. 22 cm.
   Subjects: Cascade Range.
   Wallowa Mountains (Or.)



2. An account of explorations within the tangled, rugged fastness of the Pacific Norhtwest, Of Men And Mountains is informal autobiography, deeply personal and revealing. A book of adventure and discovery, it is full of the excitement, the strength, and the exaltation that men have found in the wild.
   
   The narrative at times rises to those solitary moments when man "under conditions of grandeur that are startling can come to know both himself and God." At homelier levels it moves with authority and expertness through the accumulated lore by which man has found how to survive in the wilderness and to accommodate himself to it joyfully. But always the narrative is characterized by a freshness of observation, by a shrewd wit, and by a reverential humility that mark Justice Douglas as unmistakably of the company of Thoreau. -- from book's back cover



3. Living in Brazil, I can't remember exactly how I happened to find this book. The important aspect is that I found it, I read it and even some years later I still carry some passages in my mind, so I have to regard this book as a good one.

   It is a kind of autobiographical narrative of the youth of Mr. William O. Douglas, who later in life became a Supreme Court Judge in America.

   An interesting aspect, is that later I learned that as a Judge, Mr. Douglas would very often give shelter to the 5th. Amendment in his sentences, and by reading the book, we can sort of understand how his personality and his passion for freedom was formed many years before.

   It is a first person narrative of his early years as a child and later as young man, and we can clearly understand his respect for wildlife and independence in a human's being life.

   Recalling his early expeditions as a boy in nearby mountains, Mr. Douglas describes us the forests, rivers and rainbow-trouts of his youth. At a certain time I started to think there was too much information about trout-fishing, but we should always forgive and understand a man when he decides to tell us about his childhood. :)

   This book is not about the Supreme Court Judge, but on the contrary, it is about the poor boy who grew under the mountains and borrowed some of their magnificent dignity from them.

   I hope to read some of Mr. Douglas' Law writings one day, so I can finally understand the whole man and close this chapter. But this will still take some years, and until then, all I can say is that I have nice memories from this book. By the way, a pretty hard to find book.

3 comments about Cowboy Princess: Life with My Parents Roy Rogers and Dale Evans.

1. who enriched our lives over five decades.
   
   Cheryl Rogers Barnett has truly written a memoir full of Love, Respect, and Admiration for her late parents, Roy Rogers and Dale Evans. She writes of the people they were, before she was born, the circumstances of her adoption - yes, Cheryl was adopted by Roy and his first wife - and growing up in the Rogers-Evans* (Roy's first wife died while Cheryl was still a young pre-adolescent child, Dale lovingly took her on as her own) household. Roy, bless his soul, was in many ways, a real cowboy who eschewed the Hollywood lifestyle and could live in the great outdoors - in fact one of their early homes out at Lake Hughes was in a wooded setting - with rattlesnakes! Knowing that this wouldn't work, Roy moved in closer to Los Angeles, but always made sure that his children were grounded and did not have airs about them.
   
   Barnett writes about her growing-up in the Rogers-Evans household, and in reading it one kind of wishes that too were put of a family that truly lived by the Cowboy Code. Roy and Dale were among the kindest folks one could ever meet, and I sure wish I did. Both Roy and Dale were unfailing kind and considerate to most people they met. It speaks volumes that in the one instance Roy ever got angry at fans was when they chose to want to visit him on the day they were burying Cheryl's little sister, Robin, and only AFTER these uncouth and rude people insisted in visiting him, having no consideration for the grief of the family.
   
   She writes of the wonder horse Trigger, of how George "Gabby" Hayes was as different in real life as he was in the movies. Gabby, bless him, was a trained Shakespearian actor who was more accustomed to wearing tweed suits than a bandana and chaps - still, he too made the roles his very own. There are the Hollywood stories and vignettes of growing up knowing John Wayne and so many other Western heroes and other television and movie celebs, written straightforward, (the reader will never have the feeling that this book is a gossipy read) of Nudie the Famous Rodeo Tailor whom Roy helped to get established in Hollywood, and finally of the last decades when Roy and Dale, seeing how different Hollywood had become (mid-1960s), chose to move out to Apple Valley, and live out their lives there.
   
   Throughout it all, Roy and Dale always gave deep love to the people they knew, and encouraged their children to be the best and fine folks in their own right(after learning she was adopted, Cheryl underwent a quest to learn about her real parents, with Roy and Dale supporting her every way). With the happiness there were the tragedies, first Robin, then the young son who died serving in the U.S. Army, and the adopted daughter from Korea, killed in a senseless road accident. Throughout it all, Roy and Dale's faith in God was never unwavering and was always solid. They lived the true meaning of the Cowboy and Cowgirl Codes.*
   
   *(on their very last record together, Roy, Dale and son Dusty recorded a song written by two great friends of mine, Chris Hillman and Steve Hill entitled: "God's Plan" ...that pretty well sums up the honest and rich meaning of the lives they lived.
   
   A warm memoir of a time when the tinsel Cowboys were so very much real - and real people too, unlike the sad imitation that Hollywood has become these days. Thank you, Cheryl Rogers-Barnett for a heartwarming read, and for signing my Roy Rogers-Dale Evans lunchpail in Wickenburg, Arizona last April.



2. I loved this book! I became a little girl again with eyes wide open in awe of my heroes - Roy and Dale. Cheryl is very honest about the fun, the hectic schedules, the grief over the loss of her siblings, her rebellious nature in an innocent way, the strengths and weaknesses of her well-known parents who raised their family well, loved them dearly, lived a honorable life and had a lot of adventures in the way. Where the fans viewed Roy and Dale as super heroes ... Cheryl presents them as parents. I highly recommend this book!



3. Cowboy Princess: Life With My Parents Roy Rogers And Dale Evans is Cheryl Rogers-Barnett's true story of growing up as the daughter of "the King of Cowboys" and "the Queen of the West", whose popular exploits on movies and TV captivated the nation. Joy, the gruelling demands of the entertainment industry, the terrible loss of three siblings, and the lively personalities of those who shared their lives with Roy Rogers, Dale Evans, and Cheryl Rogers-Barnett fill this highly readable and personal account. Highly recommended for fans of Roy Rogers and the western movies of yesteryear.

3 comments about Jesus Sound Explosion (Association of Writers and Writing Programs Award for Creati) (Association of Writers and Writing Programs Award for Creati).

1. This memoir is a sad story, manifestly a story of failure. The narrator's life throughout the book was wasted. Actually, it is Anderson's behavior and its results that are sad, but not really Anderson himself. He doesn't seem to feel great remorse or regret over his loss of faith.
   It's well-written, if unremarkably so, with two manifest characteristics: an absence, or at least a rarity, of long sentences, and very heavy use of dialogue.
   Anderson tends to overlay his current (adult) perspective on his youth experiences by editorializing, which was not very helpful or appropriate.
   
   Because I perceive Anderson as drifting or going around in circles (although intermittently interested in being a Christian), I generally feel that there is no theme to this memoir, or to Anderson's life--no theme that he intended to express, that is. The one theme that I can identify is failure.
   
   It is possibly befitting the story of a life spent going in circles that I neither particularly liked nor particularly disliked it. I can think of several books more unpleasant than this--although few, if any, left such a sense of waste.
   
   Anderson's theology would seem to be represented by this statement from page 144: "Church taught me about a darkness called sin that originated with Satan, the King of Darkness. The one way to overcome darkness: become born again by asking for forgiveness of sin, by accepting Jesus Christ as personal Lord and Savior."
   However, that is what he understands of the church's theology; he either did not fully believe it himself, or had no theology of his own. If he has a theology now, it is more in the direction of secular humanism but may superficially resemble Christian teachings.
   What went wrong? Anderson seems to have desired worldly music and worldly behavior more than he wanted to follow the Lord. It is very difficult to elaborate further on his failure, because he deliberately declines to identify a specific point where his faith was lost--which lowers the value of his memoir--let alone to explain himself what went wrong. I tend to believe that the problem of his being too enamored with the world was there all along, but that argument weakens somewhat in light of the fact that Marshall, his more Christ-like older brother, also lost his faith (after suffering from depression due to an unknown cause). In fact, so did his sister, although virtually nothing else is said to suggest what went wrong in *her* life.



2. Mark Anderson's account of his life growing up in the 60s and 70s and his relationship to pop music, Christian music, God and teen sin is immensely fun and entertaining. I hope he writes another book soon!



3. I purchased "Jesus Sound Exposion" yesterday and became quickly captivated by Anderson's engrossing memoir of navigating his adolescence and young adulthood between the twin poles of Evangelical Christianity and Rock n Roll.

   Anderson transports his readers to a parallel universe riddled with dualisms: Heaven or Hell, Jesus or Satan, chastity or making out, etc. The book presents an honest look at the conservative end of the Christian spectrum and the narrow-minded worldview that accompanies it. Picture a typical 17-year-old boy compelled to share "The Four Spiritual Laws" with his high school classmates, motivated by visions of hellfire awaiting the unrepetant.

   But Anderson leavens the tale with humour and musical discoveries while dispensing grace to his parents, siblings, and Sunday School teachers. While no longer a believer per se, Anderson reveals a significant amount of personal growth and maturity, eschewing fundamentalism and black/white thinking for a catholic (little c) worldview that encompasses divorce, teaching, retail work, and the horns blaring out on Bruce Springsteen's "Born to Run."

3 comments about Paperboy: Confessions of a Future Engineer.

1. This is a great compilation of memories for anyone who grew up in Cambria Heights in the 1950s/1960s. From the stores on Linden Boulevard to the nuns at Sacred Heart School, to the kids in the neighborhood it will bring back memories of a time and place once enjoyed and long forgotten.



2. Not only an interesting recalling the 50's, but full of thought provoking insights. They creep in on the story and all of a sudden you realize you have read something deeper than throwing a paper across a lawn.



3. "Paperboy", by Henry Petroski is another one of his intelligent, friendly, winning books.Petroski, of "The Pencil", and "The Evolution of Useful Things,"wrote about his family's move from the city to the suburbs in the 1950s.However, there's more- how he had difficulty finding a place in a school that would provide him with the challenge and stimulation he needed, the comfort of family, the joy of friendship, and the challenges of the physical world.Petroski is one of the great scientist=writers, like Lewis Thomas, Primo Levi, and Stephen Jay Gould. However, Petroski is a mapper of the world of bridges, buildings, and the one who ddeply notices pencils, paperclips. and how to fold a newspaper.This is a good book, and would be a great book for many men- Father's day, birthdays, high school graduations--And, a great gift for women, too

1 comments about War and Innocence : A Young Girl's Life in Occupied Norway.

1. A nicely written autobiography of a young girl during the invasion and occupation of Norway by the Nazi's. Drama, horror of war, human interest, naval battle action. Relevant facts of the occupation (which could not have been known by the author at the time of occupation) are thrown in for context.
   Great for home if interested in subject area/time.
   Would recommend for middle school/high school libraries, especially if curriculum has 'man's inhumanity' or 'youth and WWII' type requirements.