Customer Reviews

Central Standard: A Time, a Place, a Family (Bur Oak Book)

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This is a book about growing up in depression-era and post-depression small town Iowa - stories about working for the
railroad, trying to eke out a living by farming, and the reality
of hard work and family life. Irelan evokes a time when family was important and makes everyday characters come to life in this
collection of essays about his parents and relatives as he grows up in southern Iowa.

You need not be from Iowa, be a farmer, railroad person, or have grown up during the depression to be truly entertained by this book. A story of a ordinary family that tells the truth, that no family is truly ordinary. We all share joy, grief, hardship, and love and live extrodinary aspects of our ordinary lives. Patrick tells his family's story with a manner true to his family's style. Plain but elegent, reserved but openly humerous, and with a depth that is easily felt but not described. I enjoyed it very much and hope you will as well.

Thanks

Once Americans were connected by kin and neighborliness into communities linked by the railroad. Patrick Irelan's parents set up housekeeping in this America during the depths of the Great Depression, farming one depleted acreage after another. His father was a whiz telegrapher and soon both parents were working as station agents for the Burlington Railroad, happiest, his mother recalled, while living in a Nebraska depot.

Irelan captures the ritual and spectacle of railroading. In Allerton, Iowa, we wait for the train: preparation, anticipation, arrival--in seconds only the tracks and town remain. In Chicago, however, the train waits for us.

Central Standard is the story (twenty five, in fact) of a family typical, yet so unique as to be unknowable without a guide. Fortunately, the family has provided one.

Inspired by the intricate and diligent work of a railroad man and farmer, Pete Irelan and his family, Central Standard tops the list of the best. The harshest era of our Midwest is set with joy, sadness, and the hard work of a determined and loving family. Throughout the book, Irelan emerges the reader into a world of good humor, grieving, and hope. And in the end, we reenter the 21st century with a sense of nostalgia and an understanding of what the meaning of "family" truly is. There are no gross horrors in this book, nor stories of dysfunctional people in order to keep the reader's interest. With Irelan's sense of story telling and his poetic way with words, telling a story is all we need to relive his time and place.

I highly encourage you and all your family to read this book! I can very much relate to many of Patricks stories as I too grew up on a farm under many of the same circumstances. Our young people today appear to feel entitled to an income, a great job, a McMansion of their own! This book goes back to a time, not long ago, where no one knows what health insurance is, people were more important than stuff and life was much more difficult but no one seemed to complain. I have the next two books now available, written by Patrick Irelan and look forward to more of his work.