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Title: Population: 485 : Meeting Your Neighbors One Siren at a Time by Michael Perry ISBN: 0-06-095807-3 Publisher: Perennial Pub. Date: 30 September, 2003 Format: Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $13.95 |
Average Customer Rating: 4.85 (34 reviews)
Rating: 5
Summary: Population: 485 Will Make You Appreciate People
Comment: Author Michael Perry is a poet, registered nurse, EMT (emergency medical technician) and volunteer firefighter in northern Wisconsin. Perry grew up on the family farm and rarely went to town for anything but school activities. Now, 20 years later, he's been away and moved back. He lives in a weather-worn-house on Main Street in this town of 485 where good-paying jobs are 30- or 40-miles away.
Perry's memoirs, Population: 485, Meeting Your Neighbors One Siren at a Time, is a breathtaking account of life in small-town America where weirdoes and oddballs, the upscale and the downtrodden, the fast lane and the slow pace all merge as the fabric of community life.
After years away he returns and writes about being a townie and foreigner at the same time. The result is funny and moving, an account of things that are truly important in life with insights that can only be provided by one who faces moments of life and death daily. Rarely but occasionally childbirth occurs in the arms of the rescue squad. One of Perry's ambulances carries the insignia of a stork, departmental recognition of its delivery on-board. More frequently and without regard to religious preference, income status, political belief or necessarily age, rescue squads see life at its other end, and Perry takes you on a ride that shifts between laugh-out-loud storytelling and delicate description of heart-stopping tragedy.
Population: 485 could be about this town or any other small town. Once through this book will not be enough. I find myself turning again and again to the description of the farmer's wife armed with a pistol and a Bible or that of the senior member of the fire department, a cross-eyed butcher with one kidney and two ex-wives (both work at the only gas station in town).
Perry made me laugh at myself and smile at more than a few of my neighbors in his discussion of lawn ornaments. (Gosh, he must have spent time in Vermont.) "We threw off the chains of tasteful restraint the day they invented plywood," he says. "The wooden tulip, the plastic sunflower, the begonia-filled toilet, the duck with the windmill wings and even the grandma with polka-dot bloomers bending over in the garden ... is a celebration of where we are. Fake deer, Green Bay Packer ornaments," (those are rare in Vermont) "goofy mailboxes they tell me I am in a place where, for better or worse, I know the code." And, I would argue, knowing the code is precisely what makes us feel at home.
Perry's landscape is neither steam cleaned nor blow-dried. It is one, I believe, that any small town aficionado will take to heart.
His stories are great ones about everyday people. I guarantee that if you're familiar with a small town anywhere you'll recognize his characters and find yourself thinking that sounds like someone I know.
What I found most remarkable is not just that they are great stories, but that they are true and that Perry layers this collection to a conclusion (this is my warning) that is more powerful than fiction.
Michael Perry is an appreciator of people, and Population: 485 will make you one, too.
Rating: 5
Summary: A thoughtful celebration of what ties us together
Comment: What a treat to find this great new book! This is a memoir by the most interesting character you could imagine. Michael Perry is a poet, a registered nurse, a trained EMT and a volunteer fire fighter. After years away from his small home town in rural Wisconsin, he returns and writes about the things that happen to him there. The result is a funny and often moving account of the things that are really important in life - with insights that can be gained only from a man faced daily with life and death situations. Perry has a beautiful cadence to his storytelling and makes the transition from laugh out loud storytelling to heart-wrenching tragedies seamlessly. I swallowed the book whole and marked up my copy with underlined quotations and margins full of stars of agreement. A definite must-read.
Rating: 5
Summary: Love Among the Rubes
Comment: "Summer comes on like a zaftig hippie chick, jazzed on chlorophyll and flinging fistfuls of butterflies at the sun."
If you're past a certain age, that opening line should remind you of the books that you read in your impressionable years; the ones that made you a reader for life. Think Richard Brautigan. Think Thomas Pynchon. Think Ken Kesey or Hunter S. Thompson.
Michael Perry has a sensibility and a style that assimilate the best that these guys had to offer: Brautigan's sweet, sad quirkiness, Pynchon's God's-eye view of his characters' worlds, Kesey's brawny prose and close observational skills, Thompson's prickly - and very funny - clarity of vision and expression. He goes on to outdo them, however, in a book so small and unassuming - and so tender - that you forgive him for knocking your old literary gods into the hog trough.
Framed by two stories of such pathos - something lacking in our daily lives as a rule, thank God - that we don't have a premeditated response to it, are a wealth of slice-of-life stories about the little town of New Auburn, Wisconsin, (population 485) that are so lovingly and meticulously rendered that you'll recognize your own town. Your own neighbors. Your own self.
The opening piece - "Jabowski's Corner" - tells the story of a hardworking farm family with a deadly piece of road bisecting their land. Part encomium to the farmer and his wife who raised seven girls and five boys on a rockpatch farm, part euology to the girl so terribly injured on the sharp curve known as Jabowski's Corner, and finally, part tale of Perry's attempt - by joining the local volunteer fire department and EMS squad - to weave his life back into that of the community in the hometown that he left years ago, this is a harrowing tale of faith and loss and love.
About the girl, Perry tells us, "Seven years since the accident, and this is what freezes me late at night: There was a moment - a still, horrible moment - when the car came squalling to a halt, the violent kinetics spent, and the girl was pinned in silence... The meadowlark sings, the land drops away south to the hazy tamarack bowl of the Big Swamp... all around the land is rank with life... The girl is terribly, terribly alone in a beautiful, beautiful world."
Between this horrible, lovely story and the end piece - an equally lachrymose one about Perry's sister-in-law of seven weeks' death under similar circumstances - are a series of meditations and just plain wacky yarns about everything from the semiotics of lawn tchachkes to the night Tricky Jackson wiped out the laundromat. (My favorite is the one about the big, boozy, bearded logger who thinks he's having a heart attack. He and his fellow Budmeisters are out in the middle of nowhere, and when the EMS team shows up, and the woodsy mirthmakers hear the words "cardiac arrest", they surround their downed friend like protective, demented musk oxen - "arrest" being the only word that penetrates their alcoholic fog.
In the final essay, Perry tells us about Sarah, the young girl who marries his thirty-something brother only to die in a car accident seven weeks later. "At the wake," he says, "it was her hands that made me cry. I would look at them and think of them touching my brother." Which pretty much says all that need be said about the unspoken love between siblings.
It takes a big, strong heart, I think, to join an EMS team or to volunteer as a firefighter - to look at people at their weakest and not turn away. It took that same kind of heart to write these stories.
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Title: Why They Killed Big Boy and Other Stories by Michael Perry ISBN: 096316953X Publisher: Whistlers and Jugglers Press Pub. Date: November, 1996 List Price(USD): $9.95 |
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Title: Big Rigs, Elvis & The Grand Dragon Wayne by Michael Perry, Michael L. Perry ISBN: 0963169564 Publisher: Whistlers and Jugglers Press Pub. Date: 01 November, 1999 List Price(USD): $16.95 |
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Title: Never Stand Behind a Sneezing Cow by Michael Perry ISBN: 0963169572 Publisher: Whistlers and Jugglers Press Pub. Date: 01 August, 2002 List Price(USD): $9.95 |
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Title: Thoughts on Fire : Life Lessons of a Volunteer Firefighter by Frank B McCluskey ISBN: 0595225225 Publisher: Writers Advantage Pub. Date: 20 June, 2002 List Price(USD): $12.95 |
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Title: I Got It from the Cows by Michael Perry ISBN: 0963169599 Publisher: Whistlers and Jugglers Press Pub. Date: 01 August, 2002 List Price(USD): $9.95 |
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