Clear Springs: A Memoir - Hardcover

Mason, Bobbie Ann

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0679449256 ISBN 13: 9780679449256

Publisher: Random House Inc, 1999

Synopsis

The best-selling author of In Country offers a close-up memoir of growing up in the rural farm country near Clear Springs, Kentucky, during the 1940s and 1950s, describing an existence that was rich in family ties, traditions, legends, and a culture rooted in work, the land, and common sense. 35,000 first printing. Tour.

About this title

Review:

"While exploring her past, Mason might not have intended to write a memoir for America. But she has, and brilliantly so." -- San Diego Union

"Thoroughly engaging, brimming with home truths." -- Newsday

"A call to action as much as it is a personal story, and it could inspire you to learn more about your own family history before it is too late....A bittersweet story of a time and place irrevocably lost." -- The Cleveland Plain Dealer

"While exploring her past, Mason might not have intended to write a memoir for America. But she has, and brilliantly so." -- "Associated Press""Plain-spoken, thoughtful, sometimes humorous, but never cloying, Mason's recollections of growing up in the country, striking out for the wider world in the 1960s, and then spiraling back toward her roots, are sure to resonatewith a wide audience." -- "Los Angeles Times""Fiction writer Bobbie Ann Mason's memoir tells the powerful story of the true country people of Clear Spring, Ky. . . .The book is a model of memoir and family history as Mason moves easily from her childhood back to herparents' early lives, and beyond."-- "Chicago Tribune""There is a sense of joyous purity to this book. The author is so obviously enraptured by her discoveries of the past.... Among the most amazing passages is her recreation of the possible thoughts of her paternal grandmother, a woman she had loved dearly but about whose youth and earlylife she knew little.... This book is her paean, her song of joy."-- "Knoxville News-Sentinel""Among the many strengths of Mason's memoir is its careful subtlety. Master writer that she is, Mason doesn't overplay her transformation, and that's why we feels its effects so strongly." -- "San Francisco Examiner"

From the Back Cover:

People love and remember the novels of Bobbie Ann Mason because the stories she tells of family life ring true. In this dazzling memoir, Mason tells her own story -- a multilayered saga of three generations that recaptures a way of life that has all but disappeared: a country culture deeply rooted in work and food and family, in common sense and music and the land. In Clear Springs, Mason writes about the lives of her parents and grandparents and gracefully weaves together several different lives, decades, and locales, moving from the sober industry of a Kentucky farm to the hippie lifestyle of the '60s New York counterculture to the shock-therapy ward of a mental institution; from a farmhouse to the set of a Hollywood movie; from a small rustic schoolhouse to pop music concerts. Mason depicts the changes that have come to family, to women, and to heartland America in the twentieth century, and tells her own odyssey -- how a misfit girl who only dreamed of distant places grew up and fulfilled her ambition to be a writer.

About this edition

• Publisher: Random House Inc
• Publication date: 1999
• ISBN 10: 0679449256
• ISBN 13: 9780679449256
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 296