GARY REISWIG AUTHOR

Robert Bonn, Ph.D, sociologist, and author most recently of The Unfinished Tower of Babel (2014). This book is in a word, beautiful. I found the writing elegant, poignant and vivid; transporting me into a world that I had only known vicariously (As a child, I loved westerns). Over the years I’ve read a fair amount of American history but I have never before encountered an author who enabled me to feel a personal connection with the subject matter of our nation’s westward expansion. Nor did I realize what it would mean to grow up in a working farm family on the Oklahoma panhandle. This book is a wonderful contribution to American literature.

 Robert Lipsyte, author of The Accidental Sportswriter and The Contender. Gary Reiswig’s strong, unsentimental voice carries us to a time—the fifties—and a place—the Oklahoma panhandle—that is at once exotic and home with its hard, wounded beautifully evoked mothers, fathers, and sons trying to survive one another’s love.

 Kirkus Reviews, October 17, 2014. Bookended by sections of memoir and history, these four short stories give a vivid picture of Oklahoma past and near-present. 

 Reiswig (Water Boy, 2012,etc.) was raised in Oklahoma and came of age in the 1950s. The first portion of memoir tells of life on the farm for Reiswig when he was a boy following his father’s footsteps. It culminates with his initiation in castrating a young bull, an act that leaves him dizzy and burdened with new wisdom he can’t yet comprehend. . . . They were tough people living in an elemental landscape. Reiswig writes clearly and well, a style as simple and open as the high plains, giving readers the Oklahoma of fundamentalist religion, fanatical high school sports, and all the things that hold people together through their hardscrabble existences. You don’t have to be an Okie to appreciate that. Good reads to be pondered over.