Reviews for A personal country

The average rating for A personal country based on 2 reviews is 3.5 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2019-01-31 00:00:00 Brian Maxwell An online post quoted the opening lines from this book, drawing me to lost but remembered landscapes. A. C. Greene's literary voice might sound at first pretentious with its soaring vocabulary and some long and winding roads of sentences, many of which I had to traverse twice. But it was worth the drive when I came to rest in thought and the mindscape of his well-crafted prose. Plus, I knew that voice from years of reading his column in The Dallas Morning News whenever I could, for that paper was too heavy to be mailed daily to me. "When I left West Texas, it didn't leave me" would best describe theme of his road trip back as he writes of ghost towns, trees, churches, cars, Texas history all the way back to the Butterfield stage line, oil booms and busts, droughts and floods, Greyhound bus rides, rivers, old friends and remembrances of strangers, interlaced with plenty of Texas lore. And his family. At times I had to set down the book and laugh out loud at the tales he could tell of his parents, aunts and uncles, and most of all, his Grandmother Cole. Replanted back to West Texas after surviving the Galveston hurricane of 1900, she became a librarian, and the Abilene Carnegie Library became the author's second home. She served to motivate others, telling them they were "Given a Gift" and had "Something to Say." The hardback copy is only available format and prevents sharing my numerous highlights but the gist of the value of regional relationship lies in this one: "Learning to know ourselves through where and when and who we have been teaches us to endure our share of the common iniquity, because we discover how very much of it everyone else is sharing."

Review # 2 was written on 2010-10-26 00:00:00 Pamela Boren I read this book years ago when it first came out, remembered it fondly. I was surprised to find that when reading it again the awkward writing style intruded tremendously. There were awkward and lengthy sentences that led to awkward and lengthy paragraphs that just seemed to wander through the author's memory, sometimes with little direction. It was like listening to a lecture by a stodgy old professor who sometimes got off topic and didn't realize it. It was a struggle to make myself finish this book.