A Long Run Home

Rating:
Summary: Evocative, touching and often hilarious
Review: Jack Walker is a kid with a healthy wariness about most things. Blessed with unusual powers of observation, Walker proceeds cautiously, and sometimes clumsily, through childhood, worrying about what might happen next. Often, his fears are justfied. As a kid, he's sent to a hell hole of a summer camp. As a teen, he's violated by a quick-draw enema artist of a school nurse. Jack survives it all, and comes through his often hilarious adventures a little wiser, and less innocent. It all makes for a wonderful read, a coming-of-age tale that unfolds as naturally and unhurriedly as a Saturday afternoon baseball game. Heller, a copy editor at the Washington Post, writes with the sensibility of a novelist and the precision of a veteran journalist. He has a gift for dead-on descriptions and small insights that evoke memories of what growing up was really like.