The Life and Times of the Last Kid Picked

January 28, 2002
The exhilaration and terrors of 1950s Saturday matinee moviegoing have rarely been better described than in this charming, nostalgic memoir. At a screening of Ben-Hur, second-grader Benjamin is caught by an usher—"one of the most powerful institutions on earth... the last gasp of the Gestapo"—tossing Raisinettes to his friend Chucky. Small, acutely observed moments like this characterize Benjamin's poignant recollections of growing up in the Midwest. The author, a former editor of the MansfieldNews
in Massachusetts, is at his best describing some farcical calamity—trying to get a snapping turtle off of his finger by inadvertently offering his nose (it works)—or observing the minutiae of smalltown social status, like the uproar in a Catholic school when the son of a wealthy parish family gets to skip a grade. Benjamin lovingly details the pop culture of the time (the sexual charms of Doris Day in Calamity Jane; the violin crescendos in Pillow Talk), which serves as backdrop and context for his own schoolyard adventures. While there are some girls here, Benjamin's world is mostly made up of boys. Numerous recent books on growing up male in America have made important contributions to gender studies, and this memoir, in its own unassuming way, does, too, by making vivid the contradictions and complexities of being a boy in the post-WWII era. Agent, Scovil Chichak Galen.

March 15, 2002
Whether one grows up in 1950s Wisconsin or 1990s California, many of the highs and lows of childhood are universal. Part of the charm of Benjamin's new autobiography is this familiarity. His recounting of his childhood in the post-World War II Midwest, with its swimming holes and baseball games, its movie theaters and snapping turtles, strikes a chord because it brings us all back to our own triumphs and mishaps. But it is not just Benjamin's uncanny ability to describe his memories that makes this book ring true. He also possesses an acute, dry wit that illuminates his writing throughout, giving readers the world of childhood filtered through the adult mind. Benjamin, a former editor for the News in Mansfield, MA, reminds us all of the tribulations of growing up, but his narrative reads far wittier than when we try to retell our own stories. This book is suitable for all collections. [Previewed in Prepub Alert, LJ 11/1/01.] Sheila Devaney, Univ. of Georgia Libs., Athens

Copyright 2002 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

January 1, 2002
Benjamin may have been the last kid picked for teams in his small-town Wisconsin school, but he did all right for himself just the same, in sports and in life. A writer and editor now living in Paris, he recalls his odd assortment of friends and enemies and some less-than-halcyon days in the 1950s as a smart, skinny kid from a broken home--not quite a loser but frequently a hapless victim of bullies and assorted wildlife. In occasionally poignant but more often cynical, tough, and hysterically funny vignettes, he reconstructs his "hunting and gathering" summer adventures, playing sandlot baseball and roaming woods and fields from dawn to dusk, spurred on by his boyhood television hero Paladin. It's a catalog of bloody noses, scraped knees, scary neighbors, and bullies ("Kids are mean. They go for the throat"), punctuated by occasional interference from adults, but with it comes a keen awareness of the separateness of grown-ups and kids that so marked earlier decades, especially in rural America, as well as a sense of how much our successes, however small, really matter.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2002, American Library Association.)