Customer Reviews

Reapers of the Dust: A Prairie Chronicle (Borealis Books)

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The first two chapters of this book are excellent. The second, "Gopher Hunting," begins with a startling generalization on the theme of "the narcissism of minor differences," and then embodies it in the rich detail of girl and boy hunting gophers, and the mother and father back at the house. Not a word that doesn't do its optimal work of proposing, imagining (representing), and guessing.

Point of clarification: The header says this review is by Kathleen Hudson. The review is by her husband Robert L. Hudson who does not know how to get his name to switch out with her's. Robert Hudson has published other reviews under the name OuthouseBob.

This is a book of vignettes as the author thinks back and forth over her early life and times. Ms Hudson was born in 1927 and the times are from her earliest memories to her early teen years. The life was life in rural North Dakota and Washington State, where she lived back and forth with her family as they tried to make an agricultural living during the days of the depression. She gives you a feel, a real feel for what it was like to be a kid in the cold and heat and dust and despair of North Dakota. She gives you a feel for what it was like in the relatively lush vegetation of Eastern Washington where the family prospered more but generally working for someone else.

Young Lois was very bright but often an outsider. Part of the reason she was an outsider is because she was inside her own head so much. We the reader get the benefit of that inside insight. With her family, she spent time following the crops in agricultural Washington, living in tents and trying to find a place in society where a bright girl could learn while at the same time being proud of earning a silver dollar by the considerable honest sweat of a young brow. Thus, the book as entertainment works, worked for me at least.

Occasionally, in the course of the book, she turns her attention to more profound lessons of growing up and living. You are invited to read these two consecutive paragraphs of her words that start off a chapter where she quotes 'Johnny Appleseed,' "The boy moves through his life, keeping a shy Watch on the man who now assumes his face." :

"While we are growing up, we become more surprised every year that we seem to other people to be changing because to ourselves we seem always to be the same. And even when we exult in the higher mark on the closet door where we are measured every year, we feel an increasing apprehensiveness that a day will come when we will have changed so much that nobody will remember who we are.

Thus, when we are still very young, we sense that our first memories of ourselves constitute the only reality by which we will always understand our existence. The problem is that nobody ever seems to see anything the same way we see it, and therefore the memories by which we place ourselves in time and space can never be verified by anybody else. This is the loneliness and the terror of childhood-not to see things the way anybody else sees them, not to understand why some things are "real" and some things are not."

Perhaps these paragraphs mean more to me than the average reader because I have though on and even written on these kinds of things [e.g., "The Fictional Adult" Etc.: A Review of General Semantics, vol.32 (1975), Number 3, p. 284-286]. I'm not sure Lois and I are saying the same thing but we are laboring in the same part of the soul. For me there was validation of my own poor efforts which I had thought when I wrote was unplowed ground. As I read Ms Hudson I felt that I "really" had stumbled onto something back in the early 1970's that had guided my life and my understanding of others' lives as I attempted to teach and practice psychology.

One last thing must be stated and that is Ms Hudson not only had wonderful experiences as seen through her unique eyes that she shares but also she is a master craftsman with the English language. Ignore the deeper matters if you wish and read this purely as wonderful and entertaining literature. I had never heard of Lois Phillips Hudson but happened upon this book when going through some of my late mother's "stuff." I happened to start reading and couldn't put it down. I am now in the process of ordering a copy of one of Ms Hudson's fiction contributions to literature, Bones of Plenty which has some excellent reviews on Amazon and to which I am looking forward to reading both as literature and introspective psychology