Long Gone
Richard Willis' Long Gone evokes, with an unsentimental and mordant voice, the less-than-idyllic, often brutal realities of Iowa farm life during the Great Depression. The language is spare and funny; the subject affecting. For anyone who has ever farmed, Long Gone rings true. And for any reader, Long Gone is a piercing, authentic memoir of  American life. --Nicola Smith, Harvest: A Year in the Life of an Organic FarmLife on a farm in Marengo, Iowa, in the 1930s and '40s was just plain hard. Richard Willis recalls it without bitterness or nostalgia. He records it: what it looked like, sounded like, and felt like. The constant demands of the farm seem to have left no room for anything as frivolous as an inner life. Willis escaped this grinding routine, moving into academia and the theater, and he looks back with a cold, clear eye. --Boston GlobeWhat Willis has done...with uncommon clarity of style--is to give readers the minute details of day-to-day life at a time before mass mechanization changed the economic and physical landscape forever. This is the way things were before Archer Daniels Midland became synonymous with the grain belt and food became abundant...The author relays his excitement at the prospect of a home with running water and electricity, things we now take so much for granted that to offer up a house without them would be scandalous. Still, Willis never once bangs the woe-is-me drum of childhood hardship. Rather, the tone is one of acceptance -- simply, "this is the way it was" -- as the overarching theme. In essence, Willis is grateful for the childhood he had and shows his gratitude in this simply told, yet fascinating and insightful book. --Simon Constable, TheStreet.com