A crisp, often startingly frank, reminiscence - marred by excessive
technical detail and some purple writing - of one of the first
women to be hired as a brakeman by the Southern Pacific railroad.
Niemann was an unlikely "boomer" - a brakeman who migrates around
the country as work becomes available. She has, first of all, a
Ph.D. in English from Berkeley. Moreover, by her own admission, she
was "an intellectual" who "looked like an all-American bimbo," and
a bisexual who was a product of the middle class. She also had a
history of drug and alcohol addiction. How she managed to adjust to
the rigors of life as a "boomer" and to find spiritual and
emotional strength in the process makes for an appealing yam. Many
readers, however, may find Niemann overly detailed in her
descriptions of the brakeman's duties. The fact that she
incorporates much railroading jargon into her prose - "bullringer,"
"dog catching," "kicksign" - often merely confuses, though she does
provide a glossary of terms at the end of the book. This problem
aside, Niemann is straightforward in recounting her often
steamy/stormy love affairs, her struggles with the bottle, her
problems with her mentally disturbed mother. She is especially
successful in capturing the rough-and-tumble world of the
freightyards and the relationships between the men and women who
work there. When she turns her attention to the satisfactions to be
found in sobriety, though, she occasionally overwrites, as when she
states, "I was still restless and blown around by detoxifying
emotions which, like cloud horses, thundered across my psychic
sky." Still, despite its flaws, Niemann's autobiography is a
lively, worthwhile addition to the feminist-studies shelf. (Kirkus
Reviews)
Linda Niemann's life felt like a runaway boxcar - drugs, drink and
failed relationships. So she jumped off, into the world of the
railways, into a contemporary women's adventure of the American
West.;A boomer is a manual worker on a train, usually a brakeman,
who travels to train-yards that are booming in order to find work.
This is an account of one woman's experience of five years of
booming - of coping with the physical demands, the emotional
isolation and the huge added pressure of being a woman in a
fiercely male world. What emerges is a complex portrait, of the
author's own strugglees, both inner and outer, and those of the men
around her, and of an industry and way of life fast disappearing.
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