I found this book difficult to get into at first, as the narrator and the protagonist are not the same person. Their stories intersect when the former decides to interview the latter. The narrator is a writer you occasionally want to slap upside the head, and the protagonist is one of Harrison's great characters, an engineer who has worked on dams and other projects all over the world, and has suffered a terrible accident and is recuperating close to his childhood home in Michigan. The vastly different voices threw me off at first, and there are stretches in tiny print that represent the author's tape recordings, but once the protagonist starts getting into his story the book is hard to put down, even as he ricochets from one subject to another. There are a couple twists and turns, and an ending that left me with my mouth hanging open in plain admiration. This is only my second book of Harrison's prose, the first being the superb Brown Dog. Amazon had many of the ebooks on sale for $3, so I acquired a bunch, and have been enjoying myself immensely. ( )

I wanted to like this book, because the author and I share the same home state. However, the tone of its prose simply doesn't match its subject matter. I also disliked reading about the foreman's exploits. I find these hard to believe, even bordering on insult to trained engineers. And I dislike how pretentious the main character is. For these reasons, I put the book down after little more than 40 pages. ( )

A story of an American expat who finishes his life at home in northern Michigan as told by a fictional writer, Jim Harrison.
Full of the unique and sometimes over the top characters that usually populate Harrison's books. As usual he makes them believable with his writing. I just read it for the second time. Since JH is gone I'll re-readhim once in a while. I'm going to miss him. ( )