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Title: Growing Seasons: An American Boyhood Before the War by Samuel Lynn Hynes ISBN: 0670031933 Publisher: Viking Press Pub. Date: 24 February, 2003 Format: Hardcover Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $24.95 |
Average Customer Rating: 4.33
Rating: 5
Summary: Poignant if a bit acidic
Comment: This is a prequel to the author's great war memoir, Flights of Passage, which I read with much appreciation 23 May 2001. If you have not read that book, by all means read this one first, then read it. This book is an account of a not extraordinary boyhood, but it is told in a poignant, if a bit mocking, way. When I finished it, I found myself much impressed by the way he told the story. It maybe helped that Hynes is only a few years older than I am, and that his account of a single summer doing farm work in Minnesota was filled with things I remember from my youth on an Iowa farm. It was another world and a time now irretrievably past, and I think this is an elegantly told growing up story I enjoyed as much as I did Russell Baker's memorable classic (Growing Up, read 11 Apr 1986) and Jimmy Carter's An Hour Before Daylight (read 11 Mar 2001).
Rating: 5
Summary: The father is the star of the show
Comment: If you're feeling nostalgic for your carefree youth, you may want to give THE GROWING SEASONS a read.
Samuel Hynes takes us to Depression-era Minneapolis, where he covers all the bases of coming of age, but the real star of the book is Sam's father, who struggles through hard times, moving from city to city in search of stable employment, finally finding it as an oil salesman in Minneapolis. He loses that job, too, only to open a City Service gas station, always seeming to bounce back. The man is a rock.
What's memorable about the man is his values. When his first wife dies, he remarries, not so much for love, but to find a mother for his two sons. At Thanksgiving, he asks for the neck from the turkey, claiming he prefers it to a leg or a breast. When his son dents the running board on his new car, he's grateful his boy is all right. He seems to understand that boys have to try things out, to take a risk here and there, even if it's buying a phony driver's license and carousing with his pals at roadside beer joints. There's a scene where Sam's father is on his death bed where finally he asks for a little understanding. Just before he dies, he says, "I gave up a lot."
Sam is also an endearing character. His first sexual experience is as clumsy as most everybody's is. He's not even sure he got the job done. The book ends with Sam leaving for Navy flight school a couple of years into WWII. By that time you've made friends with Sam and you won't want the book to end. But take heart, Hynes has written several other memoirs about his war experence: FLIGHTS OF PASSAGE being the most memorable.
Rating: 3
Summary: Many Questions Remain
Comment: First of all, this is a very enjoyable book. I wanted to read this because my Father grew up in the Midwest during this time frame in a similar city. While he did grow up under very different financial circumstances, I was interested in exploring the every day experiences that a young boy would live through.
The book is excellently written and vividly tracks a boys life in a world few can ever understand if you did not live during the Depression Era of the '30's. This being said, the book left me with many questions.
His brother Chuck is hardly mentioned at all. Why? Dr. Hynes does not really go into how well, or badly he did at school. That would have been interesting. What happend to the boy that ran the girl over with his car. His friends were not the kind of kids I would want my children hanging around with. It is amazing he did not do some time in reform school. I also would have liked to have known at the end, what happened to his Father and Stepmother as well as his Stepsisters.
Anyway, it was fun to read and I surely learned more about this time than I ever did in History classes.
I hope that you will enjoy it.
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Title: Flights of Passage: Recollections of a World War II Aviator by Penguin Putnam, Samuel Lynn Hynes ISBN: 0142002909 Publisher: Penguin USA (Paper) Pub. Date: 03 February, 2003 List Price(USD): $15.00 |
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Title: The Soldiers' Tale: Bearing Witness to Modern War by Samuel Lynn Hynes, Samual Hynes ISBN: 0140261540 Publisher: Penguin USA (Paper) Pub. Date: 1998 List Price(USD): $15.00 |
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Title: Jarhead : A Marine's Chronicle of the Gulf War and Other Battles by Anthony Swofford ISBN: 0743235355 Publisher: Scribner Pub. Date: 04 March, 2003 List Price(USD): $24.00 |
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Title: A Life of Privilege, Mostly by Gardner Botsford ISBN: 0312303432 Publisher: St. Martin's Press Pub. Date: 2003 List Price(USD): $24.95 |
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Title: Lost in America: A Journey with My Father by Sherwin B. Nuland ISBN: 0375412948 Publisher: Knopf Pub. Date: 07 January, 2003 List Price(USD): $24.00 |
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