Population: 485 : Meeting Your Neighbors One Siren at a Time

Rating:
Summary: Reminds me of home!
Review: Reading this book was like taking a walk down memory lane. I grew up in a small rural community, and was a member of the local voluteer fire department for several years. It was almost scary how much of this book could have been written about my experiences.

Here we get an honest look at what life in a rural community is like. Everyone in town knows everybody else, secrets are hard to keep, and changes come slowly. In this environment, firefighters are taking care of friends and family, rather than strangers, which makes the work all the more rewarding.

Perry's writing is easy to read, and includes a healthy dose of humor that offsets the inevitable tragedy that goes hand-in-hand with being a firefighter. Well done.

Rating:
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.

Rating:
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.)

Rating:
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.