White Poplar, Black Locust

By Louise Wagenknecht

Book Overview

Louise Wagenknecht grew up in one of the West's last company lumber towns, a small community called Hilt on the California-Oregon border. There she witnessed the dying years of a unique way of life, the tail-end of the 1950s lumber boom that would devastate the ancient old-growth forests of the Klamath Mountains as well as the people of Hilt, whose lives were inextricably tied to the company lumber mill. White Poplar, Black Locust is the story of that transformation, but it is also something more--a noteworthy addition to the literature of place, and a sensitive and richly textured family memoir. As Wagenknecht unravels the threads that still bind her to both Hilt's history and her own, unforgettable characters emerge, and what should have been the happy ending to this story, the marriage of her divorced mother to a forester working for the Fruit Growers Supply Company, becomes instead the end of childhood innocence, foretelling the demise of the mill and the end of Hilt itself. ? Expertly weaving memoir and history against the backdrop of a powerful yet little-known landscape, White Poplar, Black Locust is an immensely readable narrative of pain, loss, and ultimate survival. .

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0803248040
• ISBN13: 9780803248045
• Release Date: January 2003
• Publisher: University of Nebraska Press
• Length: 255 Pages
• Weight: 1.75 lbs.
• Dimensions: 9.0" x 1.0" x 6.0"

Customer Reviews

Wonderful and courageous memoir!

White Poplar, Black Locust is about the joys and sorrows of growing up in a small town in the `50s, but it's no Leave It to Beaver or Happy Days. Louise grew up in an isolated company logging town on the California-Oregon border, in many ways a paradise for kids. But it wasn't all white poplar, her childhood had its thorny locust side as well. One marvels at the resiliency of the human spirit in memoirs like Jeanette Wall's Glass Castle and Frank McCourt's Angela's Ashes. This spirit is very much in evidence in White Poplar, Black Locust, as is the same tone of detached and loving acceptance of circumstances and parents who are not as good as they could be. Wonderfully written, I loved this book from the first sentence to the last, and many times in the midst, I stopped just to marvel at a particularly apt phrase or to take in the deep honesty of the author.

beautiful memior of gowning up in a company town

I thought this was a phoenominal book. Louise weaves this memior of her childhood in a company logging town integrating social insight with the logging haydays of the 1950's and 1960's. Well researched and poignant. My copy was devoured by fellow employees while I was on vacation...