Mid-Lands: A Family Album

by Robert Murray Davis

Book Overview

Mapping out a cosmos bounded by heaven, hell, Kansas City, and St. Louis, Robert Murray Davis looks back on his life in central Missouri in the 1940s and 1950s. As he recalls his youth and early adulthood in the town of Boonville, Davis wryly contemplates some of the sharp dichotomies by which his world was ordered: grown-ups and kids, blacks and whites, Protestants and Catholics, boys and girls, town and country, work and play, art and life.

Davis...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0820336467
• ISBN13: 9780820336466
• Release Date: June 2010
• Publisher: University of Georgia Press
• Length: 224 Pages
• Weight: 0.63 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.5" x 5.5" x 8.5"

Customer Reviews

Fun to read and dead-on accurate

Since I, too, grew up in Boonville, I'm inclined in favor of this book--I'm sick of reading about people who grew up in New York. I'm also inclined to be highly critical--though I now live two thousand miles away, my hometown is dear to my heart. If Bob Davis has the audacity to write a book about Boonville, he'd better he get right. Well,he did! From the descriptions of food (". . . red Jell-o with marshmallows in it was a dessert. Green Jell-o with cole slaw in it was a salad.")to the interaction of children and adults (he's expected to apologize to an adult who nearly runs over him with a car), he's dead-on accurate. Even his thought patterns are straight out of Boonville ("I don't want to malign anybody either way, but I am pretty sure that all four of the town boys in my class were virgins when they graduated and that at least three-fourths of the country boys were not.") Highly readable and a font of information for people who think the Midwest is dull.