String Too Short to Be Saved

A beautiful memoir; a moving tribute to a beloved grandparent and to a way of life. For approximately a decade, Donnie Hall spent every summer with his grandparents on their New Hampshire farm, working hard, relaxing well, writing poetry and listening to his grandfather's stories. With unusual insight for a teenager, he recognized the value of the experience, the time spent following the rhythms of farm life, and especially those stories. A pure joy to read.

Stories of the author's childhood summers on his grandparents' farm, beautifully told. He is a man with a child of his own by the end of the book, seeing and remembering with both a child's and a man's eyes, and conscious of what is and what has been lost, and because of this the ending is a little melancholy. By the time I got to the last two chapters, I didn't want it to end--which is of course the point. I managed to find a second printing, from 1961, so the book itself seems to me a part of the past the stories describe. A lovely book.

The writing is pellucid, almost journalistic. Hall describes his summers on his grandparents' farm in New Hampshire. He draws a portrait that is American and nostalgic without being sentimental. And his sense of humor is good.

A beautiful book, especially for those who have spent any time in rural New England.

For those of us not blessed to have grown along with the boy, then the man...a small way to hold him, and those he loved, near to our own hearts...and to share in some way a life most of us never encountered.

Tales of a vanished way of life in the hard-scrabble American eastern mountains.

Yup, that's the Granite life alright.