A childhood The biography of a place

Already known for distilling the grotesqueries of his native rural South into viciously intoxicating fictions, in 1978 Crews recounted his hardscrabble upbringing in Bacon County, GA, resulting in one of the most moving and powerful memoirs ever written. A mere synopsis of the hardships of death, disease, injury, drunkenness, violence, and plain bad luck that beset Crews and his kin, for whom at times "being alive was like being awake in a nightmare," hardly suggests the resonant beauty of this telling. Born into a culture of story, Crews counts among his formative influences spinning tales about the beautiful and curiously unmaimed people in the Sears Roebuck catalog, sometimes with the assistance of his friend Willalee's superannuated grandma Auntie, born into slavery and given to strange, shamanistic proclamations. Auntie, he recalls, "made the best part of me." VERDICT In rough-hewn speech fluent as a river and forceful as a hammer blow, Crews captures the warmth, dignity, and brutality of his people and their fierce and awful devotion to home. This is his masterpiece.

The world that circumscribed the people I come from had so little margin for error, for bad luck, that when something went wrong, it almost always brought something else down with it."" Crews, whose luckless family moved around often, claims Bacon County, Georgia, as his home place, a mean, share-cropping, tobacco farming territory where ""an oak stump might cost a man a week of his life"" and ""it was not unusual for a man to shoot at his wife. It was only unusual if he hit her."" When his father died young, his uncle took over as Daddy until drinking shadowed his welcome. Crews spent his early days romping with an aging dog, playing with worms in Prince Albert cans, spooking friend Willalee Bookatee, and creating stories--wild and juicy--about the models in the Sears catalogue. This unfaltering reconstruction features the same kind of weathered regional grotesques as Crews' fiction--like Uncle Elsie, who spoke in tongues, or the Jew, a blacksuited itinerant peddler, or old Auntie on the next farm, who nursed Harry through two severe illnesses and cooked up possum miracles yet shared his catalogue fantasies with childlike abandon. It's a mottled, textured reminiscence of seasonal rituals, periodic tragedy, and indelible coincidence--he was burned by lye the day two cows died of lead poisoning, tasted his first grapefruit the day Daddy went crazy. And it is, as he indicates, as much a portrait of a place as a nuanced personal chronicle. Copyright ©Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.