The Hue and Cry at Our House
A Year Remembered
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3.0 • 2 Ratings
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- $4.99
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- $4.99
Publisher Description
The award-winning memoir of one tumultuous year of boyhood in Fort Worth, Texas, opening with a handshake with JFK, and recalling the changes and revelations of the months that followed.
Winner of the LA Times Christopher Isherwood Prize for Autobiographical Prose, and a New York Times Editor's Choice.
“A marvel of a book—elegant, touching, singular.” —Mary Karr
“Brief and moving . . . An elegantly written book, erudite, perceptive and at times painfully candid.”—Moira Hodgson, Wall Street Journal
After John F. Kennedy’s speech in front of the Hotel Texas in Fort Worth on November 22, 1963, he was greeted by, among others, an 11-year-old Benjamin Taylor and his mother waiting to shake his hand. Only a few hours later, Taylor’s teacher called the class in from recess and, through tears, told them of the president’s assassination. From there Taylor traces a path through the next twelve months, recalling the tumult as he saw everything he had once considered stable begin to grow more complex. Looking back on the love and tension within his family, the childhood friendships that lasted and those that didn’t, his memories of summer camp and family trips, he reflects upon the outsized impact our larger American story had on his own.
Benjamin Taylor is one of the most talented writers working today. In lyrical, translucent prose, he thoughtfully extends the story of twelve months into the years before and after, painting a portrait of the artist not simply as a young man, but across his whole life. As he writes, “[A]ny twelve months could stand for the whole. Our years are so implicated in one another that the least important is important enough . . . Any year I chose would show the same mettle, the same frailties stamping me at eleven and twelve.”
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Taylor (Proust: The Search), a writing professor at Manhattan's New School and Columbia University, recalls the eventful year that began with the 1963 assassination of John F. Kennedy in Dallas. Detailed, clear-eyed memories pour forth onto the pages of this slender volume. At the time, Taylor was a frail sixth grader who had just received a cherished handshake from J.F.K. outside a Fort Worth hotel. That moment of grace was followed by the shocking news of his death, the body lying in state in the Capitol, the killing of his assassin, and the solemn state funeral. Wrapping himself in a cozy remembrance of his well-meaning parents and his doomed older brother, Tommy, Taylor is hardest on himself, a sly, asthmatic boy later diagnosed with Asperger's Syndrome. Historic and cultural incidents dot the crackling narrative, including the Beatles' appearance on the Ed Sullivan Show, the Clay vs. Liston fight, A-bomb shelters, civil rights protests, and the Patty Duke TV show. Taylor, a lyrical wordsmith, broadens the usual boundaries of memoir writing with his analysis of time and childhood: "What has happened cannot happen again." In this skillful blend of dialogue between youth and maturity, Taylor sums up the value and quality of the years of his treasured past and unforgettable present, while stressing the sanctity of life.
