Pictures of Home : A Memoir of Family and City

Rating:
Summary: Family Narrative
Review: This is a tender narrative that provides uncommon insight into family life on Chicago's South Side during the second half of the twentieth century.

The author uses a multi-generational trove of his family's photographs--pre-digital age and not all that well reproduced for publication--to kindle his memory. (As the book enters the home stretch, I thought Mr. Bukowski was losing sight of the photographs, to my disappointment).

The author, to his credit, also has done some basic research, primarily in documents such as property deeds and death certificates. In doing so he illuminates forgotten details of his family's history.

This is a book, on one level, about the dynamics and intricacies of family life from the author's birth to his father's death in 2000. The most powerful chapter is entitled "Dying." It should be read by every son and daughter who has lived through the inescapable process of a parent's final illness. Mr. Bukowski composes a narrative that is tender yet unvarnished (including intimate details that reveal his own humanity).

On another level this is a rare book, in the first person, about the day-to-day meaning of homelife. It is about landscapes, the built environment, urbanism, and neighborhoods. Readers attain unaccustomed insight into life within the Bukowski family, both in its joys and its sorrows.

"Pictures of Home" reminds me very much of "Colored People" by Henry Louis Gates, Jr. in the plumbing of detailed autobiographical recollections achieved by the author as he narrated his own story.

This is more than another Chicago book. "Pictures of Home" is a narrative about humanity through the prism of the Bukowski family.