Customer Reviews

The Last Witness From a Dirt Road

5 star:		(13)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

Through a personal narrative such as this, one is able to truly appreciate the love,the traditions, and the actual workings of a plantation. This is a story of the bonds that were established - and still linger - in a rural Louisiana community during a unique time in American Southern history. Through good humor and lively dialogue, the reader develops an affectionate attachment to the characters and the way their lives were woven together. You'll close the book, wishing for a sequel.

This book is an excellent story in American history. It's rich in description and detail and pulls you into the world of this 11-yr.-old boy in central Louisiana during the 40s. The laughs, the sorrow, the warmth and realness of relationships will keep you enthralled throughout the story. Your heart will ache with Billy as he comes to realize that his immediate world around him is changing, and things will forever be different, hopefully, for the better. It shows how love transcends and blurs the lines separating black and white. This a great human interest story that will appeal to anyone. I think it should be in every library in this country and could see it as a strong screenplay. It's a great read for a long aiplane flight or a cozy evening in bed with a book. Loved it!

Having grown up myself in a similar time and place, I was mystified by the way Blacks were treated. Neither my parents the schools nor church seemed to notice that something was amiss. The Blacks all lived across the tracks from the whites and lived a shadowed life compared to the whites. Mr. Hunt's slow realization of the silent pain and suffering of this underclass mirrored my own experience.

His own idyllic childhood was immersed in the love of his family and friends and great dog. His story evoked a great sense of loss and nostalgia for those years.

I was greatly moved by this story's poignancy and reality. It is told in the same vein as "To Kill a Mockingbird", in that it reveals an adult world seen first through the naive but honest eyes of a young boy, the author himself. As in tales told by Eudorah Welty or Carson McCullers, Mr. Hunt quietly reveals to us a tangible sense of place and time in the deep South of not so long ago. Each of the characters, Mag, Papa, Billy, all actual people, will forever remain in my imagination. Mr. Hunt displays an incredible ease of storytelling. He tells not only of that bygone time but also describes fully developed people of great dimension and emotional depth. He portrays actual events and relationships between the generations and races which are remarkable in their ability to evoke the truth of the human condition. The happy, funny, melancholy, tragic, and wonderful events of life once lived along that dirt road are all here. Although that time is gone, the people Mr. Hunt tells of will live forever, for such is his ability to tell their, and his, story. This story was too quickly over, for I felt I'd come to know these engaging people. They captured first my wondrament, then my heart.

Mr. Hunt paints a beautiful and poignant story that brings the reader into a specific time and place of an entertaining, gentle and marvelous southern era. It is easy to get engrossed in the casual and friendly style of his recollections of warm childhood memories. I look forward to his next book.

Wow! A brilliantly written memoir of a short time frame in a young boy's life. A white boy who experiences a unique time in history where he realizes the life he knows on a sugar plantation is going to change forever. As the son of an overseer to the plantation, Billy comes to life. The reader truly feels and experiences the boy's thoughts--almost becoming Billy himself as he experiences the funny, sad, deep and contemplative emotions he has at age 11 going on 12. The Bunkie, Louisiana horizon simply comes to life with Mr. Hunt's vivid descriptions of the hot muggy days on the dirt road spent dwelling among his black friends, and having another life with white friends at church and school. Billy's meshing of his two "lives" is a heartwarming story! It is a depiction of realness--loving each one for who they were, not as black or white. The reader will be moved by the events depicted in this book. Great for readers--teenage and older. I can easily see this as a screenplay. Highly recommended!

I liked this little book because I liked the little boy the book tells us about. He begins his growing up phase when he witnesses the crash of a silver fighter plane piloted by one of his heroes, a World War Two pilot from his hometown of Bunkie, Louisiana. Through the few months of the life of Bill, which this book covered, Bill often went back to the site of the wreckage to comtemplate the changes in his life . He struggles with the changes in his life and the life as he has known it those eleven plus years. He wants to move forward, yet hold on to the comfort of his youth. He has many friends on Shirley Plantation who are black, and many friends in town who aren't. He is loyal to his black friends and paints such a beautiful picture of the life on the plantation that I find myself wanting to walk in the back door of Mrs. Maizie's house and ask for one of her freshly baked rolls, or spend time at the country store of Aunt Sook. There are many things going on in the lives of the black workers on the plantation which Bill participates in and he is treated like a family member by most of them.

This little boy did some growing up when left alone at Christmas while the rest of his family went to visit relatives in Texas. His mama told him not to open his Christmas gifts before Christmas day. Do you think he waited? Then there's the story about his taking the truck (which his daddy forbid him to drive) and drove to a Christmas party in town. His first boy meets aggressive girl experience which is very funny.

I think you will love the people Bill was surrounded by and you will learn more about the life of those who lived on farms or plantations in the "old" south. I enjoyed reading this little book very much.

Through the eyes of a child, Bill Hunt allows his readers to relive the year 1946 on a southern plantation. Mr. Hunt's description of life on the plantation is not only informational but amusing as well. Several times I found myself laughing out loud at some of the situations in which he found himself. Besides being a book that supplies the reader with history of the time, the author also expresses feelings,that we can all relate to, as life around him changes. Also, being from the same parish in Louisiana as the book's setting, I found myself able to relate to many things Mr. Hunt wrote of. This book is a book you will not want to put down and also one you will not want to finish. We should all be able to express our cherished memories as well as Bill Hunt has.

The author, Bill Hunt, has done a marvelous job of portraying
life as it was in the rural south during the forties and fifties.
He aptly captured the deep unsettling feeling of many people
in that region after the close of the World War II, that were the precursors of radical social change that was to come about within the United States in the 60's. Well written- well done, and a book certainly worth reading for a better understanding of the rural south during that era.

In the American South after the Civil War -- so scarred as the culture was by fire and defeat -- it was two generations beyond Reconstruction before storytellers and writers managed to attain any objective distance from the events of seventy years previous. However, romantic notions of a glorious past had already spread, telling of a glorious place now "gone with the wind." There are no traces of that glorious South because it never existed -- but the romance of it persists, waving to this day atop more than one southern statehouse.

Mr. Hunt, on the other hand, ignores none of the uncomfortable truths of the past. Not that his book is without sentimental remembrance -- it certainly has plenty, and thank goodness. But hunt does not betray those precious remembrances by illustrating them for his readers through the gauzy web of selfish rationalizations. To be sure, Mr. Hunt has written a beautiful book -- not in spite of the truth because the ugly truths are here, too. Without them, the deception of their omission would ruin the book's ability to transform the pain into the possibility of redemption.