1 comments about Finding My Way: The Autobiography of an Optimist.

1. Finding My Way: The Autobiography Of An Optimist is the self-told life story of Evelyn Stefansson Nef, a young woman born in Brooklyn 1913, who became a master craftswoman in the specialized art of creating marionettes; a skilled editor, researcher and writer; and who in her late fifties studied psychotherapy and became qualified to administer to patients. A particularly well written autobiography, Finding My Way presents a most remarkable and varied life, vividly and memorably narrated.

2 comments about Don't Throw the Bread: A Young Girl's Journey During World War II.

1. I ordinarily don't buy books anymore but wanted Gerry Niskern's book as I grew up in Phoenix, AZ and went to high school with her, but we didn't know each other. "Don't Throw the Bread" brings back memories of growing up during WWII. The way she writes I could imagine myself right there with her and her family. She made me remember seeing troops trains going through Union Station in Phoenix and my mother telling me not to say anything to anyone about them. Would I buy another book written by Gerry Niskern, Yes.



2. I found this warm, down to earth story about an eleven-day period during WWII easy reading. Gerry Niskern managed to create living history with a series of delightful family stories told by her mother during layovers on a bus trip her family took during wartime. Her description of the soldiers and sailors listening as well, while trying to get home on leave was touching. This fast paced and absorbing portrayal of her family was profoundly honest. Niskern paints compelling portraits of family members and weaves in her emigrant grandparent's experiences in America. If you remember WWII you will be nodding in recognition and younger readers like me will enjoy an easy dose of history. I found this memoir within a memoir deeply moving. You will not want to put it down and when you've finished, you'll wish it was longer.

No comments about Horse and Buggy Days on Hatchet Creek: An Alabama Boyhood in the 1890s (Library Alabama Classics).

5 comments about Native State.

1. Tony Cohan, an incredibly gifted writer - his account of finding a new life in Mexico, 'On Mexican Time', is a superior contribution to the genre of literary travel memoir - has written a sort of early prequel to that book, a fascinating and heartrending story of one man's search for a meaningful life. This is played out in retrospect as he watches his father die in present day Los Angeles. He takes us back to his boyhood in the shadow of a belittling and domineering man, who shaped him for all that was to come. Young Cohan was an accomplished jazz drummer playing with greats like Dexter Gordon in Copenhagen - and pre-Ringo Beatles in Hamburg! - but he gave this up to follow a trickier path of self-expression as a writer. This led him through the early days of the counterculture that began in the late 1950s and flowered into the sex,drugs, rock and roll, Buddhism of the 60s. Cohan hung out with Paul Bowles in Morocco, Jim Morrison in LA, Burroughs in Paris. But this is much more than a name-dropping memoir. It's the paradigm voyage of a generation, and Cohan is its very best, most moving explicator. A great and moving book.



2. I purchased this book based on the author's experiences with many artists that have touched my life. I found this to be a slow read and not particularly thought inducing. Perhaps someday as my father is aging I will re-read it and find a new appreciation for it, but until then I would suggest avoiding this one.



3. This is a favorite for me - a retrospecitve on real life adventures of a man experiencing life with reckless abandon, yet searching for something - meaning, fulfillment, legacy...
   
   Tony Cohan bares his sole, show his flaws, character strengths and character failings. No glossing over the facts, just tells it like it was. Easy to relate to for those with a sense of wanderlust. His failings are our failings. We experience his adventures as if we were there.
   
   A really good read if you like biographies, adventure, character studies...
   
   Cohan's "On Mexican Time" was also a very good book.



4. Tony Cohan's attempt to cope with the father who dominated his life has produced this splendid tale of escape into adventures literary, musical, and romantic in lands far and near. Mr. Cohan's abundant talents enabled him to find acceptance among musical and literary figures whose names will surely inspire threads of memory for readers of a certain age, say 60 and older. The memoir thus opens many more windows than would the ramblings of a less gifted protagonist.
   
   The writing is more than equal to the images it is called on to create, and the influence of Mr. Cohan's father is delineated touchingly and understandably as it evolves from early days in New York and Hollywood up to the day of the elder Mr. Cohan's death.



5. I'm quickly approaching the end of this book and already saddened by that fact. This has got to be one of the best books I've ever read. I'm principally a fan of non-fiction and this memoir has really touched me. If you fancy yourself as musical, nostalgic, cosmopolitan, idealist or perhaps, simply human in the least bit, you will undoubtedly find yourself attached to this book. Maybe I relate to it more than others will but the wanderlust, the music, the cast of shadowy figures, the distance (figurative and literal) between self and family all tug at my heart with a true, visceral immediacy. I found it extremely thought-provoking and wisdom-imparting. With jazz in my ears, misadventure on my mind, and a bittersweetness in my heart, I will be reading this one again and again.

1 comments about 791 Coney Island Avenue: Brooklyn.

1. George DiGuido's memoir, 791 CONEY ISLAND AVENUE, is a pleasure to read. The Author paints a charming and impressively detailed picture of Brooklyn life that spans the period from 1920 to 1942. He doesn't miss a thing. Topics covered run the gamut from kid's games and curse words, to the World's Fair, to the first kiss, to the city's museums and art works. So thorough are DiGuido's descriptions, I felt I knew the kid, his family, the city, the people, and the ethnic cultures, even though I've never set foot in Brooklyn. Interwoven with these wonderful descriptions is the story of a boy growing up, coming of age and leaving his childhood behind when he joins the Army early in WWII. At that time the world was in chaos, Hitler, Mussolini and Tojo were destroying the world, and young Americans boys were going off to die in places with strange names. Amidst this turmoil, the family at 791 Coney Island Avenue remains unchanged, an eternal, safe-haven in the mind of the nineteen-year-old author as he boards the troop-train for places unknown.

   This is a beautifully written memoir that will give you hours of enjoyment.

1 comments about American Pie: A Memoir.

1. Ordinarily memoirs hold little interest for me, but this book turned out to be one of the best I have ever read. It is finely crafted--the author's background as an English professor is much in evidence--and reads more like a novel than an autobiography. As a resident of Traverse City and a student of its history, I enjoyed the book for its perspective on local things from the point of view of the Jewish community here. At the same time, it presents a story of a young man growing up and escaping the intellectual and social confines of a small northern Michigan city. The thread of a bittersweet love story presents itself, too, and the pathos of that story extends to the final chapter of the book. All people who grew up in Traverse City as well as those who like a narrative well-written will want this book.

No comments about Up on the Rim.

1 comments about Mourning a Father Lost: A Kibbutz Childhood Remembered.

1. Mr.Balaban's honest look at his own experience as a product of the kibbutz, allows the non kibbutznik reader to confirm what was intuitive; that the utopian experiment of the kibbutz has gone awry, much in the way other utopian experiments of a more grandiose scale based on the premise of a "new man" have gone. Mr.Balaban also enables us to use this book as a prism with which to look at Israeli society, heavily influenced by the kibbutz movement in the 50's and 60's. Although the writting is sometimes inconsistent, its candor more than makes up for it. For anyone interested in Israel in general, and in the Kibbutz movement in particular, this is a serious piece of work. To the reader's gain, the author chose to risk the spurn of his fellow gordonians and for that he needs to be commended.

3 comments about Escape from Mount Moriah: Memoirs of a Refugee Child's Triumph.

1. Remembrance Enters Eternity
   Escape from Mt. Moriah
   Jack Engelhard (ComteQ Publishing)
   118 pages, hardback
   Reviewed by Eugene Narrett
   (Eugene Narrett is a writer and a Professor of Literature at Cambridge College in Massachusetts).
   
   Remarkable lives, lives filled with chiaroscuro, make for great literature, fiction or non-fiction, and Jack Engelhard's remarkable life has led to a notable literary gift. He has demonstrated this with novels so taut with ideas and action that they find their way to Hollywood (& inevitable simplification -- Indecent Proposal) and more recently, with a volume of memoirs whose succinct evocations of person, place and mental process allow worlds of sentiment to stand silently present without crowding or directing the reader's own thoughts and response. Impelled by his sensitivity to the ambiguities of motive, to empathy, ambivalence, & striving for a saving certainty, Engelhard is a master of the telling moment and phrase, of the summary comment (though his characters often get the last word) that implies even more than it clearly states. In evoking the fullness of a human person he has the simplicity and deftness of a master: a sharp mind, self-awareness, and a deep & feeling heart.
   
   The author knows that the roots contain the essence of the tree and its fruit, and that they live in its seeds, however far the winds of circumstance may carry them. And so in this volume, vignettes about his root, his father, are frequent for the man was an exemplary figure of loss and spiritual richness. Noah Engelhard was one of those immigrants who never adapted to the wrenching culture shock of his forced transplantation (from France to Canada during WW II). Originally a youthful Torah scholar & leather cutter in Poland, wars in the east brought him to France where he prospered as a master designer of leather handbags, and owned a factory in Toulouse. But the Nazi occupation destroyed that, and his generosity to other refugees exhausted the remainder. In Canada, his classic designs were out of fashion and he, Noah ben Yakov became "Joe," the guy who fetched Cokes in another man's factory: "Joe! Joe! Where's my Coke!"
   
   Like many immigrants, the author's father was a Jew too gentle and ambivalent to impose his teaching methodically on his son; he was an uprooted Jew who carried the House of Study within him and who searched every Sabbath for a synagogue in which the Rabbi was not a shallow positivist, affirming his congregation's attenuated Judaism; who searched even for a serious argument that would revive the world of Torah that had been violently uprooted.
   
   Left to his own choosing, the life of a scholar would have suited my father fine. He belonged in a House of Study, secluded from the turmoil of business, removed from the urgencies of daily cares. In a Yeshiva his knowledge of Torah could be stimulated, his wisdom put to the test -- and his worth as a scholar and a man could be recognized and appreciated.
   But that never happened.
   
   In that clarity of description, in that gift for succinct summary and alertness to pathos, in that sensitivity to the emotional demands and language a culture imparts, Engelhard's literary gifts shine.
   
   Along the way, in brisk but loving detail he sketches another world, a distinct culture not merely remembered but felt so fully it is reconstructed in spirit:
   
   Approaching the [factory] landing you could hear the roar of the sewing machines. Closer, you smelled the adhesives and the leather. Cutters were bent over huge tables slicing up giant stretches of animal hides. They were grinding in frenzy, never gazing up from their machines, as though somewhere in their urgency of livelihood they had lost the human sense of wonder and curiosity.
   
   As Engelhard paints it, the world of exile extends from the fashionable and also the back streets of post-war Montreal, from two-bit backbreaking jobs, to tenuous status as low-rent tenants at whim, to country vacations paid for by nerve, worry and improvised labor. Always aware and happy with what he's gained in the New World, especially as an American, he is keenly aware and deftly sketches the soul-wrenching loss & distortions that emigration, especially forced emigration, imposes on the individual and on relationships.
   
   But these experiences -- with rats in the weeds at a garden-nursery, with Jew-hating city toughs, with relatives, rich and poor, who couldn't relate, with eviction and frequent poverty -- did not defeat but aroused and deepened the author's sense of awe at the variety and mystery of human motive and deeds. His insight was quickened by seeing his parents various and imperfect efforts to adjust to the loss of one world and immersion in another in which he moved almost effortlessly; but like many first genera_tion Jews, never with a sense of fully belonging; always with a sense that something essential had been left behind.
   
   This volume's attention to up-rootedness (so like the masterly paintings of Samuel Bak, of whose art, and whose own memoir, this work reminds me), and a lifetime reflecting on the many facets of this experience, enable Engelhard to offer several wonderful epigrams about the singularity of three millennia of Jewish experience, so awesomely recapitulated in the past 60 years, the years of his life (born July 1940, as the Nazis overran France). In discussing the nearly untranslatable Jewish expression, "nu," a word that carries bemused acceptance within it, Engelhard speaks of the paradox of Jewish survival, of belief in or memory of a pure flame inside a soul repeatedly buried in dust and ashes. What results when filtered by centuries "is a kind of hopeful resignation," he writes; a will to live and somehow taste some of life's sweetness that always carries "both hope and hopelessness." The mind sees and the heart feels the defeats and impossibilities of realizing the dream; yet the flame in the soul still glows. As the Hassidic saying puts it, "the soul of man is the candle of God." And though God is only mar_ginally present in these stories, one senses that Engelhard is always ready, even eager, for Him to speak.
   
   Many of these short vignettes have a clarity so vivid in detail and sparse in evocative diction that they shine, filling the everyday prosaic world with the spirit of the world to come. In this they are like Hassidic folk tales transposed to the cities of suburbs of the new world in the 1940's and '50s, tales whose traits kept their wonder for someone who saw one world in the context of another. This quality is very palpable in memoirs like, "Relatives from America," "A Sabbath Drive," "A Telegram from Isr_ael," and "A Sister from the Past." Mystery and ambiguity fill the unspoken spaces of these simple tales. Needing a lift into town on a Sabbath afternoon in the country, young Jack gets a lift from a friendly French Canadian driver though neither understands the other: one has no English; the other, little French. But the vignette is not one of simple goodness or trans-cultural compassion. Though seemingly no one knew or saw him riding in a car on Sabbath, a few weeks later the Rabbi of Jack's Yeshiva summ_oned him and his father to meet. "You were seen hitchhiking on the Sabbath," he charges. "When?" his father asks. "Where was this?" There's no answer, just the unexplained fact. Hadn't he learned over and again that "One sees"? That "on the Day of Judgment, even the walls will testify against you..." Was the kindly driver a tempting demon? Is it possible that just as was believed in the vanished world of Jewish Poland, nothing is hidden, not even in suburban North America for a family that is sporadically _religious; perhaps especially for those who are sporadically religious?
   
   Wonder arises from those simple moral dilemmas everyone finds as they walk their daily lives, or simply gets the mail. One day a telegram comes from Israel: Jack's father's mother, whom Jack himself has never seen and with whom his father has scarcely communicated in half a century, has "at age 102, been gathered to her people," in Israel. Why should his father, who treasures the memory of his mother's saintliness, know such a sad fact, one he cannot change? So the youth conceals the telegram until the ban_al routines of a laundry day bring it to light. And then, a guilty revelation dawns: "I had committed a sin; I had interfered with the mitzvah of sitting shiva and saying kaddish. My sin could never be undone." Walking the streets of Montreal that evening, the dark sky suddenly opened to reveal an intense brightness, as if in supernal confirmation of his thoughts. And yet, consoling the penitend, his father's forgiveness comes like a benediction: "You meant well; what's done is done." In the meantime, wonder and the Beyond have asserted themselves in a heart formed by millennia of exile and the imperative to remember and hold on. Common sense and the commonplace do not negate, Eng_elhard suggests, but serve as vessels for retaining wonder and faith. Assimilation is never complete; it too becomes a medium through which transcendenc will emerge and shine, layering people and events with eternal meaning and dignity.
   
   And these are remarkable people, teeming memorably in a book so spare and easy in its telling one reads it in less than two quick hours. And then one returns to reflect, to reflect on the warm-hearted but officious sister, whose loneliness makes her needy, and whose finely honed sense of shame leads her to depart as suddenly as quietly as she arrives. On a middle-aged man, a holocaust survivor, weeping at the sight of a newspaper photograph, of a Jewish soldier, finally; of a talented, bullying choirmaster_, and the shame of muddy boots at a wedding; of an adolescent watching the World Series at a malt shop while the local Romeos flirt and then go out back with the beauty behind the counter, taking the TV with them. These anecdotes are rich with a range of initiations and a broad palette of moods, insights, and memorable encounters with Truth packaged simply for our wonder.
   
   The collection ends with an anecdote in which Engelhard, remembering an annual visit to an Orthodox synagogue, finds himself among men of his father's generation and culture, looks at himself as a new father in the context of what kind of Jewish tradition, and what sources of Jewish strength he, an externally assimilated Jew, will be able to bequeath to his own son. As he listens to the chanted prayers and ancient melodies, he writes
   
   It occurred to me then, that I was now 42, and when my father was that age, he was an old man, one of the old men of the synagogue.
   He also knew everything.
   Years from now I wonder, who there will be to show me the right page? And will there be any old men left for my son? He is only two years old, and the old men cover him with love.
   To them he is the flame. He is their eternity.
   
   In his doubt, sense of loss, and in his love, Engelhard affirms his caring and his faith for the threefold intertwining of his son, his people and tradition. In the above question, his succinct but poetic description answers itself in an ancient verse. "In Zion there will be a remnant, and they will inherit..."
   
   These wonderfully readable memoirs have the vivid reality of a lived dream; they sparkle like the islands of an enduring world amid the dazzling, distracting sea-spray of our everyday lives that immerse us in the present. We know there is more to us: that there must be a living soul. He intentionally shaped his reminiscences into eighteen memoirs, explaining that the number '18' in Hebrew spells "life," chai, and also the affirmation, "he lives!"
   
   
   Memory and sensitivity, like self-restraint and shame, are branches of love and of
   understanding the mysterious beauty of life. To offer another metaphor, they are a well of soul distilled into generations of Jews for millennia by unique paths of suffering and hope. Beyond what the mind believes or reason can show, the vivid descriptions and memories in this book are forms of honoring this tradition, sparkling simple facts attesting to its endurance.



2. "We are Hitler's children," Jack Engelhard's mother once sadly spoke, explaining the family of four's desperate poverty as they all crowded together in the one room of a house they were allowed. Explaining the loss of so much of the rest of their family in Nazi ovens. Explaining finally, their gratitude for life as only people who had to struggle for it every minute could know. "Lech Leja" intones the Biblical commandment. "Go forth!" And indeed this family had...straight out of Hell.
   
   This little book in its wise, humorous, and slightly sarcastic tone shows what awaited them on the other side. It is primarily an autobiographical sketch of Jack's life through his adolescent years, spent in Montreal. The book can easily be read in the course of a day, but while you're reading you'll be riveted by the stories, with their unique combination of pathos and humor, laughter and tears...their unique JEWISHNESS...their uncommon WISDOM.
   
   Everyone who has known the privilege of being born in a land with no war and raised in peace and freedom should read this book. It tends to remind you, as you share this family's appreciation of their blessings, just how great are your own. Five Stars
   
   John W. Cassell
   John W. Cassell is the author of five novels on the American Counterculture of the 1960's-1970's including Crossroads: 1969 and Odyssey: 1970 and numerous "Amazon Shorts" short stories primarily in the genre of military fiction, including Armageddon: 1973 and Leap into Darkness Part 1: Not my Best Birthday



3. This book is a winner within its own niche of brilliance, almost like the universe was holding a sun spot open for this author's childhood chapters, for precisely his, "Memoirs of a Refugee Child's Triumph."
   
   The book felt almost like a child's book, but not like the sometimes silly stuff which is presented as children's literature. Instead, this book felt like it was meant for the children among us who were born adult, in the good sense of the word, born wise, born serious, born knowing there's much work to be done here; not work of the body, but work for the soul of humankind, which has been lost, ignored, pushed down, and choked.
   
   What most makes me want to read Engelhard's books, especially after The Bathsheba Deadline: An Original Novel (see my review), is the pleasant environment of his easy-flowing style, which percolates with a subtle sense of joy, possibly the result of his deep love of writing surging through every inspired or perfectly chosen word.
   
   The next appeal for reading this author's books is that I know I'll find truths in them I've looked for in print but have rarely found. The soul craves the freshness of finding something new, something regenerating, solidly hopeful in a quiet way which comes from facing ugliness without flinching, then moving forward again because there's still something of value ahead, something worth knowing. Nu, nu, nu (see the book's introductory essays for an explanation of that saying).
   
   I'm thankful that Jack Engelhard honored his resistance to attempting an overwhelming research project to write a different, redundant angle on this story. As he implied in his introduction, all the book needed was for his memories to be convinced he was dedicated, at that time, to collect them on paper.
   
   Having received two of Jack Engelhard's books together I couldn't decide which I wanted to read first. When I was ready to begin one of them, I thought I might decide by reading a few paragraphs of the opening story of each. By default, I began with MORIAH, thinking I'd stop after a page or two, then do the same with INDECENT PROPOSAL. But, I didn't quit reading MORIAH.
   
   By the following morning I had read the whole of that balsamic bible of a book. I loved it. I was impressed as much as I hoped I would be...
   
   When I first saw the book's cover, I had puzzled at the biblical scene. I didn't immediately recognize it as the Rembrandt representation of God's request of Abraham to offer his son on Mount Moriah. I appreciated having the factual details presented inside the cover as well as on it. I was intensely intrigued about that event being said to have led to the creation of the Jewish people. I wanted to know more.
   
   As I opened the covers of ESCAPE FROM MOUNT MORIAH, I was deeply curious about the childhood of a person who has come to write as Jack Engelhard has.
   
   As I read further into the flap copy and introductory remarks, I began anticipating reading something special, not just a book I would welcome getting lost in, living in as a refreshing contrast to my daily routines; but a book in which I would find something worth knowing, something new, different from the repeated density in the majority of books available to readers, maybe something of actual truth.
   
   The heart craves that, especially when it's rarely found.
   
   Usually, I'm not attracted to short story collections, even knowing they might be true, significant, and well-composed. But, I was immediately attached to the chapter titles and blurbs here, especially the appealing Jewish feel of them. The meaning and number of Chai was magnetic to me, as were the type styles.
   
   The book felt to me to be more of a bible than the established ones.
   
   -- Jack Engelhard may not have been the same type of prodigy as his father was (I have no doubt that his father, Noah ben Jacob, has gone to peace and is still there).
   
   -- Jack may not have assimilated every holy word and underlying truth in the Books of Moses, as his father had, but, with Jack's light touch, he has written his own holy words of truth, and has honored his father in the process.
   
   Jack wrote Noah as he was, as well as how he appeared to Jack in Jack's efforts to know him in both his dark/wounded and bright/spiritual exposures, and Jack related to his father to the best of his straight-on, eyes-focused nature.
   
   My favorite chapter was "A Telegram From Israel," conveying a holy moment confirming compassion, even though it kept Jack's father temporarily in the dark about his mother's death. Describing the moment of that sacred omen, Engelhard writes, "... from utter darkness came incredible radiance." The father's response to Jack's act of compassion was perfection, as was his father's conclusion about the coincidence of the experience of brilliance breaking through dark clouds.
   
   That situation made me wonder if God might have wanted Abraham to say "No" to His request of offering. I want to believe that Abraham's God was a loving one and would have made right either choice for that unique, splitting-of-universes decision.
   
   Possibly my second favorite chapter was Engelhard's holding to his words, "I resign," (the chapter's title) instead of damning himself with, "I quit."
   
   Or, was my next favorite the respect awarded to young Jack by the druggist, Mr. Roberts, following Jack's successful grappling with fears surged in "The Purple Gang" territory.
   
   The core of sadness for my empathy was in the uncle's reaction to love from a nephew in "Relatives from America," and the brutality trials Jack suffered in "The Fairmount Synagogue Choir."
   
   Jack Engelhard is the one who conveys emotion without emotion. (In his review of my Amazon Short, DARK DIAMOND TWILIGHT, Engelhard had said that of my writing style).
   
   After finishing MORIAH, I felt great admiration for Engelhard's father, and was devastated that Noah wasn't allowed to live his life as the highest, holy Rabbi he could have been.
   
   Yet, maybe he accomplished more, for his son, for himself, and for his world, through those dedicated times in the synagogues, in which he grew from a polite, quiet discounting of the officiating Rabbi's inaccuracies in reading scripture, into a bold countering of the corruption of truth. Maybe the reason Noah never found his equal with whom to argue into the truest interpretations of the holy books, was because he had no equal in that. He had only the truth of the meaning in, under, and above the words. I would bet that every Rabbi Noah encountered with his corrections never forgot what Noah had said. Maybe those Rabbis went forth percolating with the right vision from Noah, somehow radiating that cleansing of misconception into our future, the future of rightness to come.
   
   Through his books, Jack is continuing Noah ben Jacob's legacy of synagogue interruption, contributing his literary voice, which I believe has surpassed the golden choir boy (Jack's honed skill Vs the darling golden boy's luck).
   
   As I had read through each chapter, I noticed a flickering in the voice Engelhard used in MORIAH. He seemed to speak as the child he was, with flashes opening onto a voice of the present of his writing the book. One of my favorite uses of voice would be like that, the child writing about the child, except for those few cracks through time when the present heart slips back, sending wisdom gained through time, to heal the child that was, and still is.
   
   To the child in each of us, living eternally,
   Linda G. Shelnutt
   Shelnutt is the author of several books on Amazon Kindle and Amazon Shorts, including QUARTER MOON DUES.

2 comments about Where the Twenties Weren't Roaring.

1. This book is a fine, easy read. Catherine's ability to describe an era so that I can recall vividly the feel of it is outstanding. This is the type of book that tells it like it was, and could be an eye-opener for those born into the post-WWII era.

   This book does not have a plot as such, but rather describes in vivid, real terms what it was like to live in the early days of the automobile: lacking indoor plumbing, cooking your own meals alongside the road when traveling, etc.




2. This is an enjoyable walk down memory land for anyone acquainted with rural America in the 1920s...or anyone who yearns for a simpler world. Catherine draws loving and respectful pictures about a time that is so very different from our current stressful situation. A gentle book ...rather like a cup of hot cocoa and a friend when you're feeling lonesome.