Reviews

The Boys of My Youth by Jo Ann Beard

miss_creant's review against another edition

emotional hopeful inspiring lighthearted reflective relaxing medium-paced

4.25

A lovely collection of essays. I love Jo Ann Beard’s writing style. The essay about her mother was absolutely gorgeous.

mbdarwin's review against another edition

5.0

Certainly one of the best writers I've read recently. Both The Fourth State of Matter and The Boys of My Youth were so masterfully written and are now two of my all time favorite essays. I still catch myself thinking about them all of the time. Bulldozing the Baby was also so creatively structured and the point of view was perfect. I could go on. Read this book. It is fantastic.

kmgard's review against another edition

challenging dark emotional funny reflective sad tense fast-paced

5.0

angie_reading's review against another edition

Beard's "Forth State of Matter" is one of the best personal essays I have read.

mearghan's review against another edition

5.0

Here are some sentences from this book that could have been written about me:
"The truth is I'm weary of all that men stuff"
"I've always had a tendency to be mean to men; now there's a reason for it"
"I'm working on having a better personality"

dianametzger's review against another edition

3.0

Honestly I was tempted to do 2 stars bc the stories are SO uneven and some are downright boring. But the good stories are REALLY good and her prose is beautiful.

perilous1's review against another edition

3.0

On the whole, his was a pretty erratic read. The author jumps around from memory to memory in her small-town Midwestern life without anything this reader could call a logical cohesion or progression. Half of the time, these short stories almost feel more like tangential modern poetry than memoir essays. The most gripping and memorable of these was, hands down, her memory of a horrific act of workplace violence that the author narrowly avoided.

While seeming somewhat unlikely, the author's recollections of her still-in-crib childhood motivations and impulsive thought processes are both amusing and endearing. (Though, I did wonder a bit at their significance to the work as a whole.) Much of the collection has a meandering feel that doesn't seem to resolve or intertwine with the rest. Which is, of course, the author's right in narrative non-fiction.

This reader's most prominent lack of connection over this book centered on the teenage and adult versions of the author. Beard has a detached, stoic sort of style, which translates well with scenes involving her younger self being high—yet, doesn't seem to provide insight into her mental inner-workings while sober. Readers who enjoy reading autobiographical works as a way of getting to know the author and their perspective more intimately may walk away from this collection with that particular desire unfulfilled.

sekulig's review against another edition

5.0

This is a marvelous collection. Poetic and ripe with details, a beautiful portrait of a life.

lindsayharmon's review against another edition

4.0

I was initially lukewarm about this collection of essays, many of which describe the author's 1960s childhood, the breakup of her marriage, or in a few cases both at once. But then I read "The Fourth State of Matter," in which she manages to combine the slow decline of her aging collie, the aforementioned separation from her husband, and the 1991 shootings by a disgruntled grad student in the U. of Iowa physics department, where Beard worked at the time. This essay is beautifully written and emotionally wrenching. I'd recommend this collection for it alone, but there were several more that took my breath away. I'll definitely be seeking out more of her work.

nssutton's review against another edition

3.0

On the whole, I wasn't into this one. In fact, it gave me a nightmare that my husband had cheated on me, and I had to explain it to all of my parents, and I carried a huge grudge against him for a whole day.

This is one of those reads that baffles me, as I know I love confessional personal essays, and yet this couldn't hold me. When I tracked down the path of how it found it's way to my reading queue, I realized that it was recommended by Libba Bray, who I also a heated reader's conflict with, in Publisher's Weekly. I probably would have liked this more during that spring of 2007, when I was reading a lot of Raymond Carver.

But I did enjoy the title story, The Fourth State of Matter, and Bulldozing the Baby.