Tom and Huck Don't Live Here Anymore
Childhood and Murder in the Heart of America
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5.0 • 1 Rating
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- $11.99
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
From a Pulitzer Prize-winning author, Tom and Huck Don't Live Here Anymore is a powerful, disturbing, and eye-opening dispatch from the homefront that will take its place alongside the works of Antony Lucas, Robert Coles, and Tracy Kidder.
Ron Powers' hometown is Hannibal, Missouri, home of Mark Twain, and therefore birthplace of our image of boyhood itself. Powers returns to Hannibal to chronicle the horrific story of two killings, both committed by minors, and the trials that followed. Seamlessly weaving the narrative of the events in Hannibal with the national withering of the very concept of childhood, Powers exposes a fragmented adult society where children are left adrift, transforming isolation into violence.
"Powers's storytelling style keeps such good control over the pacing, readers will know they're not headed for a disappointment at the ending." - Publishers Weekly
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Powers, Pulitzer-winning columnist and coauthor of Flags of Our Fathers, weaves together three eras of Hannibal, Mo.'s history Mark Twain's early 19th century, his own 1940s and '50s and the 1990s lives of two duos of teen killers to explore the dark side of young manhood in America. The story that triggers it all is absurdly mindless two teenaged boys casually kill a harmless old man they don't even know and it cries out for explanation. Powers wanders Hannibal talking to family members and friends, looking for clues and meaning. He finds himself reliving his own grim boyhood with his abusive Fuller Brush man father, which harks back to Pap Finn and Huck's subsequent escape, and then forward to an eerily Twainish teen killer. Powers's account starts sociologically (he examines what's wrong with teen culture today, citing dark imagery in advertising, entertainment and marketing) and ends up completely personally (with his brother's suicide and his longing for his father's love). The result is disturbingly powerful, mainly because there are no answers here. Yet Powers writes with such moving detail of his own father's craziness his idiosyncrasies and violent tendencies that resulted in "casual" beatings that this violence begins to say something about love, or what happens when love isn't. Powers's storytelling style keeps such good control over the pacing, readers will know they're not headed for a disappointment at the ending. 16-page photo insert not seen by PW.
