Customer Reviews

How I Got Cultured: A Nevada Memoir

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Phyllis Barber allows the reader to gain a intimate view of the clash between values of 1950's Las Vegas and her family's vallues of Mormonism. Barber struggles to use her talent of rhythm in a city celebrated for the excesses of entertainment versus her family's definition of proper use of talent within the confines of her Mormon culture. Barber uses the symbolism of marriage to both worlds to best explain the dilemna she is in. To Bobby Jack ( a current boyfriend) marriage meant a wheezing minister, ye

I remember listening to Phyllis Barber at the English Reading Series and being intrigued by her story. I thought about how she seemed to have strayed from her Mormon upbringing and then came back to it a number of years later. I also enjoyed listening to her read descriptions of natural landscape, some of which were also in the pre-reading. So I bought her book, How I Got Cultured, to learn more.
I also like Barber's style of writing. I enjoy the sort of sarcastic, over-exaggerating method she uses to paint pictures of places and things. Some of this style showed in her speech at the reading and at least one example shows up as early in her book as the introduction, where she refers to her family moving from Boulder City, Nevada just "twenty-five miles away to another planet called Las Vegas". Another example of this over-exaggeration can be read in the chapter about the Russian winter dancing studio where she describes a lady as being "tiny enough to live in a playhouse". This style of writing and speaking fits my own personality and so it caught my attention while doing the pre-reading and also during the reading. It goes along with Barber's style of discovering the world; most people don't break from their traditions as drastically as she did in order to discover the world around them. They simply read books or go on vacations. I am somewhat that way myself, if not so much in reality then in my mind for sure. Some people call this thinking outside the box. Like Barber, I sometimes experiment with living outside the box in order to see the world from a different perspective. I enjoyed reading Barber for these reasons.

My favorite genre is memoir and I read them voraciously. Having been born in Las Vegas in the mid 1950's to a mother from a large Mormon family, I excitedly dove into Phyllis Nelson's story. Aside from having greeted Leonard Berstein at the airport, (and this wasn't particularly compelling) I found nothing particularly interesting about her life story. I can see where her writing may be of interest to her family members and immediate community, but for the rest of us, what's the point?