Bingo Night at the Fire Hall: Rediscovering Life in an American Village [Hardcover]

Barbara Holland (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: September 15, 1997

A humorous portrait of the author's life in the Virginia Blue Ridge Mountains details a small town where everyone gets along and her adventures there, which include finding shelter in a bar during a blizzard and writing obituaries for the local paper."

Editorial Reviews

From Library Journal

Holland (Endangered Pleasures, Little, Brown, 1995) left her advertising job in Philadelphia when she inherited a house in rural Virginia. Here she recounts her adventures in establishing a life for herself as a single woman in a small, isolated community in the Blue Ridge Mountains. Lonely, she finds a part-time job on the local newspaper, adopts a second cat, and makes friends with her neighbors in a society that moves at a slower pace and is almost crime-free. She tells her story in a voice that is genial, funny, self-deprecating, and always aware of the differences between city and country. Only occasionally is her city-wise voice intrusive, as when she comments on the transitory nature of an old-fashioned Sunday evening courthouse concert instead of letting the scene speak for itself. Her fears are justified, however, when the beginning of a subdivision sprouts in the cow pasture below her mountaintop home. A thoughtful work; highly recommended for public libraries.?Caroline A. Mitchell, Washington, D.C.
Copyright 1997 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Kirkus Reviews

Reflections on living in the Blue Ridge Mountains, as they metamorphose from farmland and self-sufficiency to commuter subdivisions dependent on cars and asphalt. Holland (Endangered Pleasures, 1995, etc.) came to the Virginia Blue Ridge when she inherited her mother's summer cabin. She couldn't afford the upkeep on both her Philadelphia apartment and this rural retreat, so she opted for for the ``one-bedroom, one-bath house without furnace or insulation,'' but with ``flush toilet, electric stove, and a phone.'' Holland is both cautious and adventurous as, ``stiff with sophistication,'' she tries to carve a niche for herself in this self-contained community. Establishing herself as a part-time writer of obituaries on the local newspaper, she insinuates herself carefully among the regular customers at a nearby bar and never undestimates how alien she is. From her perches on the bar stool, at the newspaper office, and in her snowed-in cabin, Holland rearranges priorities. For instance, she learns that her neigbors believe that government people don't do much--``What could anyone possibly do while sitting at a desk?'' Doing, for them, is ``fixing the tractor, nailing shingles on the roof . . . motion.'' Nevertheless, Holland gives due to both her long- established neighbors who raise pigs, can tomatoes, and chauffeur children, and to those newcomers who chauffeur themselves back and forth on the highways to city jobs. She explores the history of the region: Its point of reference is the Civil War, and its hero is Southern guerrilla John Mosby of Mosby's Rangers. She celebrates the rhythms of community suppers with supportive neighbors but accepts the inevitable replacement of small towns with the Internet. Still, it was lovely while it lasted, and Holland describes the past and the intruding future eloquently, without whining: ``I was told as a child to eat what was put on my plate.'' -- Copyright ©1997, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 224 pages
• Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt; 1st edition (September 15, 1997)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0151002681
• ISBN-13: 978-0151002689
• Product Dimensions: 8.3 x 5.7 x 0.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 12 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 4.4 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (18 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,707,806 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

8 of 10 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Barbara Holland's way with words is extraordinary., August 28, 1999

By 

[e-mail] (USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Bingo Night at the Fire Hall: Rediscovering Life in an American Village (Paperback)

I live in the county where Ms. Holland resides and this book contains a delightful description of our lifestyle and values here. Her view of life is delightful and will fill even the most modern minded soul with nostalgia for ways that are too quickly passing.

5 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A Finger in the Dike: Standing in the path of the suburbs, December 3, 1997

By 

Kay A. Douglas "Avid reader and traveler" (Maryland) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Bingo Night at the Fire Hall: Rediscovering Life in an American Village (Hardcover)

Those of us who live in once completely rural areas, or even those who are confirmed city dwellers with a sense of the need for clear boundaries between rural and urban will find a lot to think about while reading this book. From the edges of her rural community, Holland watches the passage of a way of life as developers buy up local farms and transform them presto chango into "countryside estates," houses which look, as Holland notes, like they're "dropped from the sky." What I especially liked about this book was the way it chronicles on a very personal level the regrets the author feels as this process takes place. It's a sort of quiet requiem for a way of life she has never fully participated in, but admires. From where I sit, across the Potomac River, watching the suburbs creep into Montgomery County's "agricultural preserve", her musings are painfully familiar. But they aren't bleak, which is this book's saving grace. When I finished the book I had a clear, almost intimate feel for the author sitting in her little house on the mountainside, "still there."

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Charming author in a strange new world, October 12, 2007

By 

Debra Hamel (North Haven, CT) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Bingo Night at the Fire Hall: Rediscovering Life in an American Village (Paperback)

When she was in her early 60's author Barbara Holland moved from Philadelphia to Loudon County in Northern Virginia, to a small house in the Blue Ridge Mountains some 60 miles outside of Washington D.C. It might as well have been a different planet. In Bingo Night at the Fire Hall Holland describes the world she came almost by accident to inhabit, a place somehow "unreachably far beyond the headlines and the evening news." Her house on the mountain overlooks a fertile valley in which the same families have farmed for generations. As she describes it, the people there live (or lived, at least, in the 1990s, when she was writing this book) in a sort of time capsule, a Mayberry-like idyll of 4-H clubs and church picnics. It's a place where nobody locks their doors (locking them would seem unneighborly), where people are defined not by their resumés but by their family ties.

Holland approaches her subject from a number of different angles, with chapters on the area's extensive role in the Civil War, for example, and on the weather and wildlife:

"I was pleased and excited to have a bear, until I followed the tracks to the lower porch and considered the remains of the trash bags. Among the strewn litter of crushed cans and coffee grounds the bear, like a psychotic burglar, had defecated copiously."

But what makes the book stand out is her description of the ethos of this place, where families' lives are intertwined over generations and where one is surrounded by one's family:

"On any given day a person in the supermarket could come across his or her entire extended family, one by one, aisle by aisle, pausing to exchange fragments of news among the canned goods. This would horrify city folk, whose relatives tend to get on their nerves, but we're a low-strung lot around here and our satisfaction with our birthplace spreads to include our kin -- or perhaps we consider them one and the same."

It would horrify me, certainly. But Holland writes about this way of life so well that one not only understands it, one almost pines for it:

"Relatives are more useful here than in the city or suburb. They have tools you can borrow. They're someone to call, in a taxiless world, when you need a ride. Someone to leave the kids with or go hunting with; someone to help get your firewood in or your boat painted. Someone to carry your coffin. From cradle to grave, my neighbors here swing in a hammock of family ties and nobody leaves except for the churchyard. Even the few who fled to Florida get carried home in the end."

The book makes clear how much modern lifestyles differ from the way of life that was natural to so many generations before us: small communities of neighbors living off the land, interdependent, clustered around a handful of public buildings--the bank and post office and general store. Nowadays, Holland writes, people don't need towns. They need highways between their work places and their living spaces, with places to shop in between.

At the same time that Holland is celebrating life in her valley, however, she is also recording its demise. The land that fed armies on both sides during the Civil War is yielding--increasingly, inexorably--to strip malls and housing projects. The fertility of the soil doesn't matter if you're only interested in paving it over. One can see through Holland's eyes how this influx of rootless Others is an affront to the land.

Holland, of course, is herself an immigrant, but unlike the housing developers who are carving the valley into subdivisions, she did not efface her surroundings; she adapted to them. Being an outsider also made her a keen observer of the world around her, which we can only be thankful for. I enjoyed Holland's book enormously. It is charmingly written and wise. I'll be seeking out more from her.

-- Debra Hamel