****** - Verified Buyer
4.5
I found this book in the wonderful Morristown, NY library marked "Overdue Fines Apply" which means folks have been keeping it beyond the due date to reread it and pass it around. As soon as I finished it I went on Amazon and bought my own copy to pass around my family and north country friends. It is crafted as superbly as a St. Lawrence River skiff and portrays the contradictions of idyllic summers in the Adirondacks, suffocating but sublimated tensions between "Father"--that's what he was always called throughout the boy's life!--and this only-child author, who wondered early on what it could mean that his family, the scions of a copper-mining fortune, could be so privileged in a world where mineral wealth was more valued than human life. It is a great story, a great read, and casts shadows not so unlike those we all see in our own lives and families. The Thousand Islands and the Adirondacks are places of lower and middle class economic struggle with scores if not hundreds of places where the monied families of the Gilded Age spent their fortunes and created mythic lifestyles. Nobody has caught the results better.Now excuse me, but I've got to back to Amazon to get what I was looking for in the village library--Hochschild's latest in a terrific line of historic portrayals of colonial Africa, colonial slavery, Stalin and, now, World War ITo End All Wars: A Story of Loyalty and Rebellion, 1914-1918Jim Doyle
