Childhood: The Biography of a Place - Hardcover

"Crews is, obviously, a unique southern raconteur. . . . It's easy to despise poor folks. "A Childhood makes it more difficult." It raises almost to a level of heroism these people who seem of a different century. "A Childhood" is not about a forgotten America, it is about a part of America that has rarely, except in books like this, been properly discovered."--"New York Times Book Review"

"It is Crews' great gift that he can show us how absolutely cursed, and alsolutely beautiful, we are. . . . Crews burns through the easy ways in which we would like to regard ourselves; what he leaves behind is something better, something touched by the refiner's fire. --"New York Newsday""

Crews is, obviously, a unique southern raconteur. . . . It's easy to despise poor folks. "A Childhood makes it more difficult." It raises almost to a level of heroism these people who seem of a different century. "A Childhood" is not about a forgotten America, it is about a part of America that has rarely, except in books like this, been properly discovered.--New York Times Book Review

It is Crews' great gift that he can show us how absolutely cursed, and alsolutely beautiful, we are. . . . Crews burns through the easy ways in which we would like to regard ourselves; what he leaves behind is something better, something touched by the refiner's fire.--"New York Newsday"

Crews is, obviously, a unique southern raconteur. . . . It's easy to despise poor folks. A Childhood makes it more difficult. It raises almost to a level of heroism these people who seem of a different century. A Childhood is not about a forgotten America, it is about a part of America that has rarely, except in books like this, been properly discovered.

--New York Times Book Review

A Childhood is the best introduction to his work. It explains so much of where Crews was coming from in his blood-tinted fiction. . . . This memoir has a foot in another world, a weird, old Depression-era America. Crews writes with knowledge and feeling on a wide series of topics, from farming to factory work (his mother later takes a job at a cigar-making factory) to food and sex. . . . This memoir is for everyone. It's agile, honest and built as if to last. Like its author, it's a resilient American original.--Dwight Garner "New York Times "

It is Crews' great gift that he can show us how absolutely cursed, and alsolutely beautiful, we are. . . . Crews burns through the easy ways in which we would like to regard ourselves; what he leaves behind is something better, something touched by the refiner's fire.

--New York Newsday

The book itself is a work of art, beautifully produced by University of Georgia Press and illustrated by gorgeous woodcuts of key moments in the narrative. . . . Crews achieves a persona remarkable for reflecting from the writer's present while conveying the world and viewpoint of the five-year-old who gets scalded one day at a hog boiling and the boy who later is incapacitated by polio.--Richard Gilbert "Narrative "

A Childhood is the unforgettable memoir of Harry Crews's earliest years, a sharply remembered portrait of the people, locales, and circumstances that shaped him - and destined him to be a storyteller. Crews was born in the middle of the Great Depression, in a one-room sharecropper's cabin at the end of a dirt road in rural south Georgia. If Bacon County was a place of grinding poverty, poor soil, and blood feuds, it was also a deeply mystical place, where snakes talked, birds could possess a small boy by spitting in his mouth, and faith healers and conjure women kept ghosts and devils at bay. At once shocking and elegiac, heartrending and comical, A Childhood not only recalls the transforming events of Crews's youth but conveys his growing sense of self in a world "in which survival depended on raw courage, a courage born out of desperation and sustained by a lack of alternatives".