Portable Prairie: Confessions of an Unsettled Midwesterner
| Author | : | |
| Rating | : | 4.76 (981 Votes) |
| Asin | : | 0312326912 |
| Format Type | : | paperback |
| Number of Pages | : | 256 Pages |
| Publish Date | : | 2014-10-20 |
| Language | : | English |
DESCRIPTION:
The girl who would be Tolstoy Timothy J. Bazzett I was afraid when I began this book that it was going to attempt to emulate the Russian master. In saying this, I'm probably revealing my own proletarian ignorance. I've never managed to finish Anna Karenina, although I've started it several times in my life. Maybe someday, because I want to read it, honest! Life gets in the way, just as it has for MJ Andersen. You have to make a living. She ended up at the Providence Journal for these many years. I ended up working for the Defense Department - as a Russian linguist, no less. So I know I should read Tolstoy; I've just not gotten around t. Finding Home M.J. Andersen's search for home will resonate with just about anyone, whether you've moved a 100 times or lived in the same town your entire life. She is looking not just for a physical space to call her own, but an emotional one as well.Anderson's story is both amusing and touching, as she takes the reader through her childhood in South Dakota, through her years on the east coast - first at Princeton and eventually in Massachusetts and Rhode Island. She understands the human need to find what is recognizable in any place - especially in a place where one's ancestors originated. She writ. An accurate and enjoyable book L. Pole I grew up in South Dakota, and really enjoyed and appreciated how this book captures the feelings of that experience: the beauty of the endless prairie meeting the boundless sky far off on the horizon, the wonder and awe of Minneapolis, and the feeling that you never quite fit in anywhere else in the world but the prairie.
Exploring subjects as seemingly unrelated as Roy Rogers and Tolstoy's beloved Anna Karenina, she repeatedly locates a transcendent connection with South Dakota's broad horizon.Andersen introduces us to her hardworking newspaper family, which produces one of Plainville's two competing weeklies; to Job's Daughters, a Christian association intended to prepare young women for adversity (Plainville's chapter assumes the added responsibility of throwing the town's best teen dances); and even to a local variety of hardy alfalfa, to which her best friend has a surprising kinship.Leaving behind her physical home, Andersen travels E
. Although occasionally indulging in heartland-centric generalizations ("the Midwest has long been the imaginary home of all Americans"), this is an enlightening, moving rhapsody on the spirit of place and the meaning of home. From Publishers Weekly Before even mentioning her Midwestern roots in the first chapter of this memoir, Andersen compares the events in Anna Karenina to a train-related suicide in her current Massachusetts hometown, musing on Tolstoy's love/hate relationship with his family estate, and his religious conversion, flight from home and subsequent death at a train station. In vivid recollections of childhood (which could stand on their own), she recalls the