Customer Reviews

Hold Autumn in Your Hand (Zia Book)

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I was introduced to this book in a Texas literature class in college and was completely charmed by it. Then I shared it with my grandfather, who spent his youth "workin' on the halves" in the very country inhabited by the characters in this book, the blackland prairie of Texas. My grandfather is not normally a voracious reader of anything besides the newspaper and the Bible, but he zipped through this book in a few days. As he returned it to me he said with a grin, "I didn't think he was gonna get it all in there, but he did!" A tribute to the authentic feel of the story. I would recommend this book to anyone with an interest in agrarian traditions, sharecropping, the 1930s, or the durability of the human spirit.

Perry creates an easy and enjoyable read while at the same time providing deep insight into the lives of tenant farmers in the Depression-era deep South at the dawn of the welfare state. The author's resourceful and loyal creation is Sam Tucker and his family, whom Perry portrays as hardworking, neighborly, poverty stricken, and yet content. The story follows a myriad of concerns that faced many, if not most, poor and uneducated tenant farmers in East Texas during the 1930's. Whether White, Black, or Hispanic, they all faced the same obstacles of bad weather, ravenous insects, sick children, or belligerant neighbors. But Tucker, despite all of these unfortunate setbacks and tragedies, is able to maintain, sometimes through sheer will, an enviable optimism and determination to press on for the provision of his loved ones. Now Tucker is no "too good to be true" fellow, he indeed has faults, and it is these faults, as well as his responses to the tragic events that unfold in the story, that help to paint the lucid image of his glowing humanity and that of his family.

Interestingly, the book has a number of not so subtle parallels to a certain Steinbeck novel of the same period.

Highly recommended.

"Hold Autumn In Your Hand" by George Sessions Perry is a deeply felt and powerfully moving work that deserves to be better known within the canon of American literature. The slim and highly readable work powerfully evokes the feel of the American South in the 1930s. Perhaps because its author produced so little due to his mental illness, this book is still little known outside a small base of those who hold it within their affections. After reading this book, a reader will feel that he or she has truly gotten to know Sam Tucker and his family. The book can and should be better known, and deserves greater recognition for its eloquent portrayal of a man and his struggles.

I once had a Texas in-law who had been a share-cropper in the 1930's, so I was excited to read this book to learn exactly what the sharecroppers' lives were like. This novel, written in a beautiful and unique style, gives you the heartrending details of such crushing poverty, showing the dignity of the people without preaching. Want to find out what the depression was like? Read this book! I found this book more moving than Steinbeck's Grapes of Wrath.The Grapes of Wrath

Once the reader falls into the steady, slow rhythms of Perry's novel about an impoverished Texas farmer of the 1930s, the book becomes almost compulsively readable. It has little action other than Sam Tucker's quest to tame nature and to wrest a living from the Texas soil, yet the novel evokes a sense of drama and of real accomplishment.

A key passage highlights for me the fact that Perry has a social agenda. He is an idealist who believes that cooperation among human beings is essential for our species' survival. Call him a populist or a dirt-road socialist, but don't forget this, on Page 136:

"Once you knew what Sam knew, that ignorance and disease, the blackness of the night and the terror of the storm, were the great eternal enemies of man, there could be no tolerance for those who sought to replace the processes of patient reason by violence, joint effort by war. . . . If salvation, in the form of progress and fulfillment, were ever to come to men, it must come through intelligent trust, by rising above fear, abd by means of the natural affection of man for man that automatically occurs when fear is removed, like the emergence of green leaves when winter is over."

This unforgettably expresses the best of the sentiments that grew out of the Great Depression.

George Sessions Perry's Hold Autumn in Your Hand is a classic piece of Texas literature. He writes in a style that allows the reader to whiz through the pages, and makes you fall in love with the characters and their problems.

Sam Tucker is a hardworking and decent tenant farmer during the Depression. He is trying to get his family out of the duldrums they have found themselves in the last few years. He finally gets some luck when he is allowed to farm a piece of land that has enough acreage to make a profit. With one neighbor helping him every step of the way and another trying to thwart his attempts to prosper, Sam is able to use his optimism and will power to succeed as a tenant farmer during the Depression.

I loved the story pertaining to his neighbors cow, along with his quest to catch the giant fish (one hilarious and the other filled with mixed emotions). There are some classic characters riddled throughout Hold Autumn in Your Hand (the grandma for example) and some funny scenarios, which make this a must read for anyone. Everyone enjoy!

This book uses extreme poverty as a backdrop to reveal the lyricism of the struggle to survive. In these days when materialism and cynicism are rampant, this book shows how "Just enough" is beautiful and satisfactory. I read this book as a young girl and its poetry is with me still