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Books > Language & Literature > Literature: history & criticism > Literary studies > From 1900

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This Boy's Life (Paperback, New edition) Loot Price: R367
Discovery Miles 3 670
You Save: R88 (19%)

This Boy's Life (Paperback, New edition)

Tobias Wolff

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List price R455 Loot Price R367 Discovery Miles 3 670 You Save R88 (19%)

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Wolff shifts to nonfiction in this jewel-like memoir of childhood in the 1950's. Despite the all-American props - Boy Scouts, cars, basketball - this boyhood unfolds light-years away from suburban heaven, offering instead a divorced mother and her angry son trying with little success to cut a piece of the American pie. Wolff sets the tone right off the bat, as he and his mom, driving to Utah to strike it rich as uranium prospectors, watch a truck careen towards a fatal crash. From then on, one dark episode follows another. Wolff recalls his early years in Florida, where he shoots arrows at friends and lies in the confessional. When he and his doting mom finally settle in Seattle, he becomes a petty delinquent, shoplifting, drinking, writing bad checks, breaking windows, scrawling obscenities on walls. Some of this seems reaction against his wealthy, estranged father, now dead, about whom he feels "grief and rage, mostly rage." Most adults treat him shabbily - a problem accentuated when his mother links up with a man named Dwight, a Lawrence Welk freak who smells of turpentine and brutalizes Wolff into husking chestnuts until his fingers bleed. He finds some relief in the Boy Scouts, which offers "the clean possibility of mastery"; in high school, he dreams of running away to Alaska, but instead he escapes to a prep school in Pennsylvania. An honest memoir that puts a new spin on familiar boyhood rituals: many authors have recalled watching Annette on the Mickey Mouse Club, but how many write about their buddies shouting crude sexual come-ons at the screen? Lucid, bitter, precise, terribly sad: the real-life equivalent of Wolff's acclaimed fiction. (Kirkus Reviews)
A memoir of a young boy's unusual travels with his mother. The author recreates his boyhood experiences, relating how he and his mother travelled throughout the United States, and tracing his experiences and changes from young boy to manhood against the background of a violent and wildly optimistic America.

General

Imprint: Bloomsbury Publishing Plc
Country of origin: United Kingdom
Release date: September 1999
Authors: Tobias Wolff
Dimensions: 198 x 129 x 18mm (L x W x T)
Format: Paperback
Pages: 243
Edition: New edition
ISBN-13: 978-0-7475-4601-6
Categories: Books > Language & Literature > Biography & autobiography > General
Books > Language & Literature > Literature: history & criticism > Literary studies > From 1900
Books > Language & Literature > Literature: history & criticism > Novels, other prose & writers > General
Books > Biography > General
LSN: 0-7475-4601-0
Barcode: 9780747546016

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