Rating: 
Summary: The Last shall be First
Review: The test of this book was whether I could see what Benjamin described with my mind's eye or only picture the actual town and people as I remembered it and them, whether I would get lost in the book or use it only to find familiar names and places, whether it would speak some general truths about childhood and growing up or speak only of one specific place. The book passed the test with an A plus. I was swept along by the narrative, the humor, the observations, especially of the complex social strata of kids, and specific descriptions, like 8,000 ripe dead tadpoles in a wash tub on the porch. He wrote about a specific time and place that I remember but he also wrote of any time, anywhere. He spent from about 1949 to 1963 in Tomah, from birth to age 13, or so. I spent from 1953 to 1958, from eighth grade through high school. I attended eighth grade at, yes, St. Mary's school. Two of my sisters were in grades on either side of him, the older one a friend of his sister, Peggy. She remembers that Peggy had brothers, but not much else about the author. She remembers birthday parties in the apartment he described. The summer of 1961, I believe, I worked at the Carlton with his dad, a tall, handsome, schmoozing, archetypical bartender, and also probably with his mother, but I remember no waitress with that last name. As my perspective is of one nine years older than he, I tried, reading the book, to imagine what, say, Dubliners born in 1873 thought about what that young punk James Joyce, born in 1882, wrote about their city. Did they get it, or did they just focus on the Dublin specifics? Or did they do both, enjoy the references to their city but also appreciate the work as literature. Not that Benjamim is a Joyce, but the book is a portrait of the writer as a young man. And not that Tomah is a Dublin or even a Stevens Point, but it is a major part of the portrait.
Rating:
Summary: Good real life story of all boys in th 50s
Review: This is a must read for all of us the wished that we were the best jock, but only measured up to normal. It tells just how good we had it and really how funny life is after a few years.
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