Rating: 
Summary: A thoughtful celebration of what ties us together
Review: 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.
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Summary: An Excellent Author and an Illustrative Read
Review: I live in a small N.E. town, but no I am not a member of the volunteer FD or an EMT. I do own a scanner (like a good many people in town) and rely on the services of my neighbors who answer their pagers! I feel secure knowing who they are and that they carry pagers. I do breath a sigh of relief when they show at a scene and I can turn a situation over to them.Perry is an amazing observer and who paints his people, especially himself and his family, and their landscape with a fine hand. The last chapter of the book "Sarah" I found poignant, but not maudelin, and reread several times. Finishingthe book was like finishing a cup of coffee and natter with a good friend. The layout of the book within each chapter is simply a series of humerous vignettes, or parts of one, alternating with Perry's take on life whether in a small town or in the general scheme. Unfortunately, I found some of Perry's alternate "takes" and similes a bit too erudite, and at times, the vocabulary, even sophomoric. The writing, in these instances, could have been a bit more "lean and mean." However, what kept me going through the book was that Perry, in my opinion, gets the "takes" good most of the time. The one on "sense of place" is almost Benedictan in its outlook, while "sleeping in the woods" could be Buddist in its outlook. While I am not going to rush out and buy several dozen copies of this book to distribute to my firefighter friends, I will look forward to hearing more about and reading more of Michael Perry's writings.
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Summary: Fine tales from the Midwest
Review: POPULATION: 485 is a patchwork of stories, history & memories written from the perspective of a native son's return to his home town as a First Responder. Michael Perry writes with an unerring eye for community, nostalgia, tragedy, comedy & self-reflection. Tears & laughter are the spices which make this as welcome a read as a hot toddy on a cold night. Rebeccasreads highly recommends POPULATION: 485 for anyone who relishes the humor & drama of everyday life in a small American town hanging on to life by the roots of its families.
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Summary: Population: 485 Will Make You Appreciate People
Review: 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.
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Summary: Love Among the Rubes
Review: "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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Summary: Close to Home
Review: Population: 485 is a book that makes me want to laugh and cry, generally on the same page. I grew up in a small town, worked the VFD then moved away to return some years later. I can readily identify with what Mr. Perry has written in his book. It hits close to home. If you have ever lived in a small town, served on a small fire department/EMS service, or ever wanted to, this is a book you should read. The story involves characters that are unique to small towns and they will make you smile and chuckle. The coming together of people to help one another will make you beam with pride. And the tragedies involved with his work will make you cry with a hurt that is all too familiar. Well written with enough detail to make the experience real Mike Perry has written a book that will reside forever in the dens and family rooms of small town firefighters and EMS workers. Its humanity and inside along with the characters and stories will make it an enjoyable read for anyone. You cannot go wrong with this book.
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Summary: Small Town Living Captured Perfectly
Review: From describing interactions between feuding high school sweethearts in the middle of Main Street to Kodiak-chewing characters that make you say, "I know that guy," the picture of small town living Michael Perry creates for readers is dead on. I couldn't stop reading, laughing, sighing, shaking my head - this book has it all. Because I was raised small town Abrams, Wisconsin, I can honestly say that Perry captures the bittersweet life people live there and, he made me a little homesick. Please read this book!
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Summary: Fine tales from the Midwest
Review: POPULATION: 485 is a patchwork of stories, history & memories written from the perspective of a native son's return to his home town as a First Responder. Michael Perry writes with an unerring eye for community, nostalgia, tragedy, comedy & self-reflection. Tears & laughter are the spices which make this as welcome a read as a hot toddy on a cold night. Rebeccasreads highly recommends POPULATION: 485 for anyone who relishes the humor & drama of everyday life in a small American town hanging on to life by the roots of its families.
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Summary: As fine a book as you will ever read
Review: Really. The author grafts one of the most gratifying writing styles I've every had the pleasure to read onto his experiences as an ambulance EMT and a fireman in his small Wisconsin home town. This creates a text of wonderful simplicity and beauty. The cover understates the case of the book. This book grows from the conflict between what we think and believe, and how life actually works out in the day to day details and dramas. (Now here's the improbable part: One Sunday morning, as I dragged my laundry up the hill to the laundry mat at 6 am - to miss the crowds - I saw this book lying in the middle of the street. There'd been rain the night before and it was soaking wet. On my way back from the laundry two hours later, it was still there, so I picked it up and scanned the cover. Interesting. I'll take it home, dry it out, and toss it on the pile. I read between 30 and 40 books a year, so it's quite a pile. I put it on the heater to dry it out - probably not the wisest choice - and when I smelled something toasting, took it off and flopped its wrinkly pages open. I started reading and was instantly hooked, by both the style and the raw honesty of the author. Everything else could wait; I had to read this book.)
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Summary: Great Book
Review: A really enjoyable book. Perry is an excellent writer--a style that captures you. The book gives a great look into what volunteer firefighters do on an everyday basis, and he throws in some humor as well.
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