Those Days: An American AlbumThe MacArthur Grant-winning journalist who has written previously on village life in Asia, Africa, and Latin America here turns to his own heritage in a history of his family from 1880-1940. Initially, the book seems a skillful, but placid portrait of rural Midwestern life. However, uncovering the tragic dissolution of Critchfield's father--the author knew him only as a young child--turns the story from thoughtful nostalgia into a brooding chronicle that is turbulent, disturbing, and completely fascinating. The book's core is drawn from interviews with neighbors and family, as well as contemporary local newspapers, and hundreds of family documents, letters and journals. These pages of interviews re-create the dream-like workings of memory, fastening on minor details, linking unrelated images and ideas, omitting basic facts, yet telling the important story. Critchfield extrapolates and fills in details, his careful research justifies and gives credence to these fictions. |
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Page 55
... wife and children huddled under buffalo robes , Mahlon braved wind and snow , tramping ahead of the team to break a way through the drifts . You'd think it needs must be that an age thus ushered in should be the grandest that the world ...
... wife and children huddled under buffalo robes , Mahlon braved wind and snow , tramping ahead of the team to break a way through the drifts . You'd think it needs must be that an age thus ushered in should be the grandest that the world ...
Page 318
... wife had asked him to throw a blanket , two pillow cases and a sheet into the furnace and make up the bed with clean ... wife . Jim took an overnight adjournment . From the Free Press , October 8 : " HEINRICH KRAUSE CONFESSES WIFE'S ...
... wife had asked him to throw a blanket , two pillow cases and a sheet into the furnace and make up the bed with clean ... wife . Jim took an overnight adjournment . From the Free Press , October 8 : " HEINRICH KRAUSE CONFESSES WIFE'S ...
Page 319
... wife , Gertrude , on the head with the hammer more than once , I think it was two times ; then I got up and carried ... wife's body in the car . He stopped once at the Ed French farm to burn the bloodstained pillows , sheet and blanket ...
... wife , Gertrude , on the head with the hammer more than once , I think it was two times ; then I got up and carried ... wife's body in the car . He stopped once at the Ed French farm to burn the bloodstained pillows , sheet and blanket ...
Contents
Prologue | 1 |
Saints 17741884 | 13 |
Hadwen and Jessie Family Journal 188491 | 24 |
Copyright | |
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