Join the group on Wednesday November 20th at 1pm by the fireplace at the library!
After eight commanding works of fiction, the Pulitzer Prize winner
now turns to memoir in a hilarious, moving, and always surprising
account of his life, his parents, and the upstate town they all
struggled variously to escape.
Anyone familiar with Richard
Russo's fiction will recognize Gloversville, New York, once famous for
producing that eponymous product and anything else made of leather. This
is where the author grew up, the only son of an aspirant mother and a
good-time, second-fiddle father who were born into this close-knit
community. But by the time of his childhood in the 1950s, prosperity was
inexorably being replaced by poverty and illness (often
tannery-related), everyone barely scraping by under a very low horizon. A
world elsewhere was the dream his mother instilled in Rick, and strived
for for herself, and their subsequent adventures and
tribulations--beautifully recounted here--were to prove lifelong, as
would Gloversville's fearsome grasp on them both. --from the publisher
