Identify Containing Books The Boys of My Youth
| Title | : | The Boys of My Youth |
| Author | : | Jo Ann Beard |
| Book Format | : | Paperback |
| Book Edition | : | First Edition |
| Pages | : | Pages: 224 pages |
| Published | : | January 29th 1999 by Back Bay Books (first published January 1st 1998) |
| Categories | : | Autobiography. Memoir. Nonfiction. Writing. Essays. Short Stories |
Jo Ann Beard
Paperback | Pages: 224 pages Rating: 4.1 | 4333 Users | 488 Reviews
Commentary In Favor Of Books The Boys of My Youth
Rarely does the debut of a new writer garner such attention & acclaim. The excitement began the moment "The Fourth State of Matter," one of the fourteen extraordinary personal narratives in this book, appeared in the pages of The New Yorker. It increased when the author received a prestigious Whiting Foundation Award in November 1997, & it continued as the hardcover edition of The Boys of My Youth sold out its first printing even before publication. The author writes with perfect pitch as she takes us through one woman's life -- from childhood to marriage & beyond -- & memorably captures the collision of youthful longing & the hard intransigences of time & fate.Describe Books Toward The Boys of My Youth
| Original Title: | The Boys of My Youth |
| ISBN: | 0316085251 (ISBN13: 9780316085250) |
| Edition Language: | English |
Rating Containing Books The Boys of My Youth
Ratings: 4.1 From 4333 Users | 488 ReviewsWrite-Up Containing Books The Boys of My Youth
I liked these a lot and would recommend them. Some of the essays here are just so nice to read. (Skip Coyote though; as one wonderful gr reviewer put it, It must have been laborious as hell to write, because it was laborious as hell to read. I'm not a courtesan. I don't have time.) While the overly-dramatized, overly-neat memoir style seems slightly dated, it is really satisfying for an essay to have a cohesive narrative and Jo Ann does it well. (The post-modern I think this happened but I cantOn the whole, his was a pretty erratic read. The author jumps around from memory to memory in her small-town Midwestern life without anything this reader could call a logical cohesion or progression. Half of the time, these short stories almost feel more like tangential modern poetry than memoir essays. The most gripping and memorable of these was, hands down, her memory of a horrific act of workplace violence that the author narrowly avoided. While seeming somewhat unlikely, the author's
Everyone loves this book. No one writes bad reviews of this book. The Boys of My Youth is Jo Ann Beards only book to date. Everyone is right. The book is amazing, but I am going to tell you what I did not like about the book.Beards descriptions of childhood are just too well done. While reading them, memories of your own childhood bubble up. And not just the good memories, but also the memories that sting, the memories you thought were gone.And really, as you are reading the book, she flits
William H. Gass, that curmudgeonly king of American letters, proclaims with enormous exasperation that that the perils of the present tense are pronounced. In his 1996 essay, A Failing Grade for the Present Tense, he shakes his finger like a schoolmarm and scolds, What was once a rather rare disease has become an epidemic. And sounding like our elders in Washington, who wonder where in the world the outrage went, he woefully concludes that if there is an academic prose, this prose is collegiate.
Quite the most spectacular collection of essays I have come across. The writing is outstanding, the truths manifest and unflinching. There were moments here, as the author recounts the last days of her mother, that I was reminded of Knausgaard's precision memory, but, of course, these essays predate his series by 20 years. I don't know when I will read anything this good again, but I will keep looking.
Jo Ann BeardInterviewed by Michael GardnerJoAnn Beard is a graduate of the Nonfiction Program at the University of Iowa. JoAnn Beard served as a visiting writer to the MFA program at Saint Mary's College of California in the fall of 2003. MG: This is the first year that the nonfiction genre exists in the MFA Program at Saint Mary's College and will also be the first year in which works of nonfiction will be included in Mary Magazine. In developing my ideas about the genre of nonfiction, I
i hate when i read a sample on amazon and those first few pages are so good but when you get the book in your hands you find that each subsequent page is a little more literary than you thought...read: blah, or uppity or just fanciful. Not that it's bad at all. I understand all the accolades Beard received and I LOVED Inzanesvile but this one i couldn't read more than half. I just hoped the next essay would be better but it was just more poetic stuff. Boo!
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