Wow! Anyone that says they had a rough childhood should read this to see what Harry Crews endured. This book read a lot like fiction, so it would be an enjoyable read for those that typically do not like to read memoirs. Readers should remember that this was a different time when reading some of the more shocking things in this book, as parts can be offensive if the time period is not taken into account by the reader.

My thanks to NetGalley and the publisher Penguin Group- Penguin Books for a copy of this classic memoir of life in the South.

Harry Crews has a one of a kind voice, a mix of dirt, venom, fear, failure, a tad of charm, and a lot of home. Characters looked to save or be saved, even when doing the worst things people could do to each other. And no one fought harder, faced more demons then did Harry Crews as he shows in his biography A Childhood: The Biography of a Place, a biography that is equal parts gospel and heretical, sometimes in the same sentence.

Mr. Crews describes his first six years of life on a rural farm, during the Depression, but it could have been a century or two earlier. His father passed away young, worked to death in trying to make a living, on Earth that fought the farmers for everything they could reap. Tales of his father fill the narrative, and the lose that the boy suffered is a pain that never went away, no matter the successes, or his escaping the world that killed his father. The world they inhabit is mean, with no reason for why things happen, they just do. Say the wrong thing, off comes your hand, though the chopper soon has to watch out for retribution. Fights were a calendar to the people, events remembered in oh a few weeks after that fight, or a day or two before this fight. This was a part of Georgia that might have existed in a dystopian science fiction novel.

Not a book for the faint of heart, as it is a rough read, not your typical ghostwritten entertainment memoir. However as with all of the works that Mr. Crews has written there is a spark that is impossible to imitate, a memoir that makes you feel bad as you read for these people, as you laugh at what happens. Mr. Crews might not writer of these people, and himself, in a good light, but he loves them, for all their meanness and problems, and that shines through in his writing. For fans of the less genteel Southern writers.

Harry Crews' memoir evokes the Southern Gothic aspects of life in rural Georgia during a particular time and place. This is a South where the races maintain a relationship circumscribed by long-established cultural rules; where a white man may call an African-American the "n word" in one moment, and behave as if there is no insult in referring to a person in that way the next. Crews' childhood is rife with hardship, heartache, and challenges, but his ability to divine the human heart and its befuddling ways makes his narrative shine. From disease to grinding poverty, sugar-cane soaked biscuits to fried opossum, Crews' life in the South ensnares the reader's imagination and heart effortlessly. This is a book that takes hold of you and doesn't let go until the end.