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Original Title:	The Boys of My Youth
ISBN:	0316085251 (ISBN13: 9780316085250)
Edition Language:	English

The Boys of My Youth

Jo Ann Beard

Paperback | Pages: 224 pages

Rating: 4.1 | 4333 Users | 488 Reviews

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Title	:	The Boys of My Youth
Author	:	Jo Ann Beard
Book Format	:	Paperback
Book Edition	:	Special Edition
Pages	:	Pages: 224 pages
Published	:	January 29th 1999 by Back Bay Books (first published January 1st 1998)
Categories	:	Autobiography. Memoir. Nonfiction. Writing. Essays. Short Stories

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Rarely does the debut of a new writer garner such attention & acclaim. The excitement began the moment "The Fourth State of Matter," one of the fourteen extraordinary personal narratives in this book, appeared in the pages of The New Yorker. It increased when the author received a prestigious Whiting Foundation Award in November 1997, & it continued as the hardcover edition of The Boys of My Youth sold out its first printing even before publication. The author writes with perfect pitch as she takes us through one woman's life -- from childhood to marriage & beyond -- & memorably captures the collision of youthful longing & the hard intransigences of time & fate.

Rating Based On Books The Boys of My Youth

Ratings: 4.1 From 4333 Users | 488 Reviews

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These seriously are some of the best essays I've ever read in my life. I can't even say how much I loved this book, and now Jo Ann Beard. What a fantastic writer. Every single essay in this collection made me laugh AND cry.Thank you, Mike Reynolds for such a wonderful gift. (I finally read it! )

Have been promising myself to read this and not just because of her name! And it is wonderful, memoir written like fiction, yes, about the boys of her youth but also ones set in her adulthood as she goes through separation and divorce, and in The Fourth State a terrific low key account of (view spoiler)[ a shooting spree carried out by a disaffected student at the place where she worked (hide spoiler)]. Didn't quite get on with 'Coyotes' (partly set in the head of a coyote), but the rest were

Quite the most spectacular collection of essays I have come across. The writing is outstanding, the truths manifest and unflinching. There were moments here, as the author recounts the last days of her mother, that I was reminded of Knausgaard's precision memory, but, of course, these essays predate his series by 20 years. I don't know when I will read anything this good again, but I will keep looking.

William H. Gass, that curmudgeonly king of American letters, proclaims with enormous exasperation that that the perils of the present tense are pronounced. In his 1996 essay, A Failing Grade for the Present Tense, he shakes his finger like a schoolmarm and scolds, What was once a rather rare disease has become an epidemic. And sounding like our elders in Washington, who wonder where in the world the outrage went, he woefully concludes that if there is an academic prose, this prose is collegiate.

So good. SO GOOD! It took me about 50 pages to get in to the groove, but then I never wanted it to end.

On the whole, his was a pretty erratic read. The author jumps around from memory to memory in her small-town Midwestern life without anything this reader could call a logical cohesion or progression. Half of the time, these short stories almost feel more like tangential modern poetry than memoir essays. The most gripping and memorable of these was, hands down, her memory of a horrific act of workplace violence that the author narrowly avoided. While seeming somewhat unlikely, the author's

Could this be the best collection of essays that I've never heard of? I'm not sure how I didn't know this work before a friend slid it to me to read but I'm glad those nightmare days are over. I was viscerally moved by many of these essays. I teared up often. Beard is such a beautiful writer and the clarity she has about her feminist awakening, her tumultuous childhood, and her failing marriage is enviable. My absolute favorite essay was the last- Boys of My Youth- which was much more about her