The Life And Times Of The Last Kid Picked
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- £5.99
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- £5.99
Publisher Description
Through the telling of his own madcap childhood, David Benjamin pays homage to the exuberance of young boys at play. Whether he's stalking frogs though the swamps of Tomah, Wisconsin, playing four-kid baseball with his bothersome little brother and two favourite cousins, or sneaking into the cinema to watch Saturday-afternoon Westerns, David Benjamin is the kind of kid who would have eagerly fallen in with Tom Sawyer. In relating his adventures - including one truly sorry incident with Snappy, the snapping turtle, and a run-in with a particularly fiendish squirrel - David Benjamin is by turns hysterically funny, movingly sincere, caustic, aggrieved and intrepid. Traversing the nooks and crannies of kidhood from playing fields to swimming holes, The Life and Times of the Last Kid Picked captures a time and a place in twentieth-century life and magically recalls the myriad scrapes and adventures and wanderlust that once made childhood such an exhilarating enterprise.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
The exhilaration and terrors of 1950s Saturday matinee moviegoing have rarely been better described than in this charming, nostalgic memoir. At a screening of Ben-Hur, second-grader Benjamin is caught by an usher "one of the most powerful institutions on earth... the last gasp of the Gestapo" tossing Raisinettes to his friend Chucky. Small, acutely observed moments like this characterize Benjamin's poignant recollections of growing up in the Midwest. The author, a former editor of the MansfieldNews in Massachusetts, is at his best describing some farcical calamity trying to get a snapping turtle off of his finger by inadvertently offering his nose (it works) or observing the minutiae of smalltown social status, like the uproar in a Catholic school when the son of a wealthy parish family gets to skip a grade. Benjamin lovingly details the pop culture of the time (the sexual charms of Doris Day in Calamity Jane; the violin crescendos in Pillow Talk), which serves as backdrop and context for his own schoolyard adventures. While there are some girls here, Benjamin's world is mostly made up of boys. Numerous recent books on growing up male in America have made important contributions to gender studies, and this memoir, in its own unassuming way, does, too, by making vivid the contradictions and complexities of being a boy in the post-WWII era.
