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Loading... 100 Tricks Every Boy Can Do: A Memoirby Kim Robert Stafford
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Sign up for LibraryThing to find out whether you'll like this book. No current Talk conversations about this book. Kim Stafford is a second generation poet and essayist. He is the son of William Stafford, Oregon Poet Laureate and pacifist. William Stafford was a conscientious objector during WWII. He and his wife raised their four children in a loving, bookish principled home, mostly in Lake Oswego Oregon. The two boys, Kim and Bret, were close in age, almost twins. In this book, Kim Stafford attempts to come to terms with Bret’s suicide in 1988 at age 40. Told in a series of 100 vignettes; this book is beautifully written. There is a wonderful sense of place. The Staffords loved the outdoors, and I loved reading a book set in my own, wonderfully lush, Pacific Northwest. “I have realized only recently that in my childhood we were poor. Maybe we felt rich because we lived with bountiful stories, ideas, places. Abundance was everywhere—the sky, rivers with their infinitely changing ways, mornings in summer that lasted longer than a life.” The book is sad. Stafford searches through his memories of his childhood and his brother, looking for the reasons behind his brother’s depression and suicide. Bret was the good brother, Kim more the troublemaker. Kim wonders if this is what doomed Bret. Kim’s survivor’s guilt is palpable. At times I wanted to shake Kim and tell him, maybe it isn’t about anything you or your family did or didn’t do. Maybe it was just lousy brain chemistry. Kim knows this at one level, but at another level can’t keep himself from looking for answers to the unanswerable. no reviews | add a review
"Bret and Kim Stafford, the oldest children of the poet and pacifist William Stafford, were pals. Bret was the good son, the obedient public servant, Kim the itinerant wanderer. In this family of two parent teachers, with its intermittent celebration of "talking recklessly," there was a code of silence about hard things: Why tell what hurts? As childhood pleasures ebbed, this reticence took its toll on Bret, unable to reveal his troubles. Against a backdrop of the 1960s - puritan in the summer of love, pacifist in the Vietnam era - Bret became a casualty of his interior war and took his life in 1988. 100 Tricks Every Boy Can Do casts spells in search of the lost brother: climbing the water tower to stand naked under the moon, cowboys and Indians with real bullets, breaking into church to play a serenade for God, struggling for love, and making bail. In this book, through a brother's devotions, the lost saint teaches us about depression, the tender ancestry of violence, the quest for harmonious relations, and finally the trick of joy."--""Interrogates memory to find a brother lost to suicide, portraying two boys against the backdrop of an atypical 1950s American family. Their father, a poet and pacifist, occupies a large presence in their lives as they forge identities together and apart, and ultimately through loss"--Provided by publisher"-- No library descriptions found. |
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Google Books — Loading... GenresMelvil Decimal System (DDC)818.5403Literature English (North America) Authors, American and American miscellany 20th Century 1945-1999 DiariesLC ClassificationRatingAverage:
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also read Stafford's Wild Honey Tough Salt - amazing ( )