Childhood Country: And Other Short Stories from an Itinerant Early Life

A lonely boy's landscape encompasses the U. S. Middle West

and California during the Great Depression 1930s through the

World War II home front and late 1940s. Broken shards of

youthful memory: rooming with strangers, moving from place

to place with sudden frequency and continual uncertainty

because of poverty and a mother's marital failures. Seen

through a boy's eyes from six to sixteen, here are children and

adults in the throes of financial hardship and tumultuous

wartime: an empty house with deathly echoes, relatives swept

into the cataclysm of war, a cousin gripped by suicidal grief, a

family betrayed, and unexpected humor, friendship, hope and

first love. He escapes into movies, comic books, adventurous

imagination with fantasy excursions, and fascination with

guns. Through it all is his mother, raised on dreams of a

luxurious life but thwarted by doomed relationships as she

searches for love and security when both are rationed or

transient. He lives an adolescence not knowing who he is or

where he belongs as events propel him toward the looming

horizon of manhood.