Heart Earth

Doig's memoir of the year he turned 6 is based on letters written by his mother during her last months of life to her brother, who was serving in the Pacific during WWII. Narrator Tom Stechschulte underplays Doig's emotional journey as the author pays tribute to Berneta Doig, an independent Montana native who refused to let her life-threatening asthma hold her back, whether she was on horseback herding sheep or at the kitchen table visiting with girlfriends. Unfortunately, owing to Stechschulte's steady intonations, listeners are not always immediately able to differentiate between Doig's narrative text and quotations from Berneta's letters. Further, he misses the mark for Doig's father's Scots accent, making the elder Doig sound distinctly Irish. Nonetheless, listeners will be drawn to Berneta's spunk and vivid observations. C.B.L. (c) AudioFile 2011, Portland, Maine

August 30, 1993
In poetic and precise prose, Doig has crafted a worthy complement to his acclaimed memoir, This House of Sky. While that book concerned family tensions after his mother Berneta's death in 1945, here, prompted by a cache of his mother's letters to her sailor brother from that year, Doig recreates a life ``the five-year-old dirtmover that was me'' could hardly have known. He describes life in an Arizona housing project for defense workers, where his family moved to spare his mother's asthma. He tracks down his Uncle Wally's old beau, about whom his mother wrote. He recalls the battle between his grandmother and father over his mother's medical condition, ``the geography of risk'' and the family move back to Montana ranching. Doig's writing is immensely quotable--listening to his elders was ``prowling with your ears.'' What makes this book so touching is that, through letters, Doig realizes how much he, the writer, owes to ``this earlier family member who wordworked.''