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How do we become the people we are? In her remarkably astute memoir, Pulitzer Prize-winning book critic Caldwell examines her life, and comes to the realization that while she's a product of Texas and a child of the '50s and '60s, she's also very much her father's daughter.
Caldwell is a believer that Texas is as much a state of mind as a state of the Union. An open landscape that inspired loneliness, fearsome storms of biblical proportions, and a scorching heat relieved by afternoons spent in the cooler environs of the local library are just some of her childhood memories. As the political environment heats up, Caldwell becomes a fervent antiwar activist, despite her father's veteran status and prowar stance. And when she later moves to Massachusetts, she uncovers an old family secret, and with this discovery begins to come to terms with her origins.
Caldwell's immense love of literature peppers the pages of her work, enchanting readers with mentions of the books that helped her grasp her life and "ride it to victory." From Faulkner to Styron to Uris and Kerouac, Caldwell's beloved writers have helped her recognize the kind of person she wanted to be. Often comic, sometimes poignant, and composed with intelligence and emotion, A Strong West Wind offers a sharp analysis of an examined life by a writer worth knowing.
(Spring 2006 Selection)
A Strong West Wind: A Memoir
Narrated by Nicole Poole
Gail CaldwellUnabridged — 7 hours, 0 minutes
A Strong West Wind: A Memoir
Narrated by Nicole Poole
Gail CaldwellUnabridged — 7 hours, 0 minutes
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Overview
Editorial Reviews
This is a coming-of-age memoir by a prize-winning book critic of the Boston Globe who writes, consciously and romantically, as a surviving member of her generation: the one that "was wrapped in the flag long before we set fire to it." Born in 1951, in Amarillo, Tex., Caldwell was raised by patriotic American conservatives who watched in horror as their pride and joy became radicalized by the peace and liberationist movements of the late '60s and '70s. Carried along on a tide of sex, drugs and political protest that alienated her not only from her parents but from herself as well, it wasn't until her late 20s that she began to see that she wanted to think and write more than she wanted to go on honoring the impulses of the rebelling moment. Yet, true to the Platonic ideal of never disavowing old loves, Caldwell wouldn't trade what she has lived through for the world. As a direct result of her abiding loyalty to her own past, she has arrived at a considerable piece of wisdom: "The trick is to let a time like ours shape you utterly without... [making] a career out of estrangement." Her book is an attempt to convey all the parts of the experience. But as this is a memoir, not a polemic, no part of it is without its own complications. Caldwell's memories are laced through with an overwhelming nostalgia for the Texas where she herself could not make a life. Her adolescent dreams, she tells us, almost always "involved breaking free of those lonesome, empty plains, whatever it took." Yet her prose is riddled with longing for the father with whom she identifies, and who is the very personification of a Texas-full of grit, courage and the refusal to knuckle under-that she insists on finding worthy of admiration. The nostalgia is both enriching and problematic, as it almost inevitably leads this writer into the sea of rhetoric. And while the rhetoric is not deep enough to sink a ship, it is sufficient to leave the author floating too often in "poetic" abstraction when she should be grounded in prose that is both penetrating and precise. Nonetheless, Caldwell comes through as a wise and winning woman-her descriptive passages on college life in Austin in the '60s and '70s are wonderfully smart, moving and sympathetic-and she emerges from A Strong West Wind a memorable narrator. (Feb. 14) Vivian Gornick's latest book is The Solitude of Self: Thinking About Elizabeth Cady Stanton, published by Farrar, Straus & Giroux. Copyright 2005 Reed Business Information.
A Pulitzer Prize winner for her work as chief book critic of the Boston Globe, Caldwell recalls a Fifties childhood in the Texas Panhandle and her escape through books and, eventually, rebellion in the Sixties. With a six-city tour. Copyright 2005 Reed Business Information.
Advance praise for A Strong West Wind
“I loved A Strong West Wind. [Caldwell] writes of her adventures in the sixties and seventies, and the quest for truth in California, with the authentic voice of the children who once made life hell for the ‘Greatest Generation’ and in the process turned out pretty great themselves.”
–Russell Baker
“Gail Caldwell’s quiet, burnished memoir is a story of a life’s affections—for her Texas parents, for the sere landscape of the panhandle, and for the road paved with book upon precious book that runs in both directions: far away and home again.”
—Richard Ford
“Gail Caldwell's book measures the sweep of one life against literature, history, legends of Texas, and the infallible truth of real feeling. This is a brave and moving work.”
—James Carroll
“An elegant memoir. Gail Caldwell performs something like alchemy—taking the base metals of the Texas Panhandle badlands and turning them into pure gold.”
—Ward Just
Product Details
BN ID: | 2940170644513 |
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Publisher: | Recorded Books, LLC |
Publication date: | 03/11/2008 |
Edition description: | Unabridged |
Read an Excerpt
How do we become who we are? The question belongs not just to genes or geography or the idea of destiny, but to the entire backwash of culture and its magisterial march -- to Proust's madeleines and Citizen Kane's "Rosebud" and anyone's dreams of being someplace, anyplace, else. I was a girl whose father had taken such pride in her all her life, even when it was masked as rage, that he had lit a fire in me that would stay warm forever. I was the daughter of a woman who, on a farm in east Texas in the 1920s, had crept away from her five younger siblings so that she could sit on a hillside and read - a mother whose subterranean wish, long-unrevealed, was that I might become who she could not. Each of us has these cloisters where the old discarded dreams are stored, innocuous as toys in the attic. The real beauty of the question - how do we become who we are? - is that by the time we are old enough to ask it, to understand its infinite breadth, it is too late to do much about it. That is not the sorrow of hindsight, but its music: that is what grants us a bearable past.
*********** P a r t I *********** PROLOGUE For a long time, my want for Texas was so veiled in guilt and ambiguity that I couldn't claim it for the sadness it was. I missed the people and the land and the sky -- my God I missed the sky -- but most of all I missed the sense of placid mystery the place evoked, endemic there as heat is to thunder. You can be gone for years from Texas, I now believe, and still be felled by such memories: Some moment on a silent afternoon -- a cast of light, some gesture by a stranger -- can fill you with a longing that, by the laws of desire, will always remain unmet. And yet the truth was that I had been glad to go: that when I drove across the Tennessee River Bridge, I had wept with a kind of wild relief. The morning I left Austin was on a hot Friday in June, and my old Volvo overheated 80 miles north of town; my response was to pull the thermostat, throw four gallons of water in the backseat, and keep going. I drove through remote little East Texas towns named Daingerfield and New Boston, certain that such places divined what I was leaving and what I was going toward. The trunk of the car held an Oriental rug, a beat-up German typewriter, and a quart of Jack Daniels, and I racked up 500 miles a day pointed north by northeast, listening to Springsteen and Little Feat. At night, exhausted, I checked into cheap hotels along the highway, where I collapsed with a glass of bourbon and "Sophie's Choice," imagining that my new existence would be a female variation on Styron's Stingo - he was a Southern boy, after all; he knew a good tragedy when he saw it; and he had migrated all the way to Brooklyn to become a writer. Irritated by my mother's ordinary concerns, I called her, finally, from New Jersey to announce that I was safe, and that I had crossed four state lines in one day. Because she had spent most of her life landlocked in Amarillo, where you can see halfway to New Mexico without leaving Texas, she didn't believe me - surely even the miniscule states of the East took longer than that to get across. I made it to New York, then Cambridge, days after the Summer Solstice, that time of innocence and rue when the sun is poised toward diminishing returns but seems as though it will hold you in its light forever. It was 1981 and I was 30 years old, and while I scarcely knew it at the time, I had just finished -- or rather, launched -- an odyssey I'd been plotting my entire life.I grew up in the badlands of the Texas Panhandle, a place so vast and empty that its horizon is interrupted only by grain elevators, oil derricks, and church steeples. This is the Bible Belt, after all, where the daily grain-and-sorghum reports on the radio have to compete for attention with the church billboards along the farm-to-market roads, each of them offering a particular short-cut to heaven. The place was settled by Apaches and Comanches, and later, by preachers, ranchers, and farmers, with the men of God having the easiest lot: The only crops that do well on the Caprock, besides homegrown salvation, are wheat and grain sorghum. Given the Old Testament weather that defines the country, it's little wonder that religious faith became the cornerstone of the land and the people who stayed. I've seen hailstorms and tornadoes roll in over those fields with no more warning than God allowed Job, and a summer thunderstorm in Texas, which you can smell before it strikes, can be as humbling as it is ferocious. When a blizzard hits the Panhandle, which happens more often than you'd think, the greatest danger is to the cattle - there are no trees or rises of the land to break the wind, and so the cattle can breathe the snow, flying horizontally, and drown. People, too, have been brought to their knees for generations by this kind of weather: In the midst of so much nothingness and force, it's difficult not to feel beholden to some larger design. The skyline in northern Texas was made by the wind, which hammered the place into clay and caliche and near oblivion, then took what was left of the land and carried it farther west. These are truths you don't forget and can't amend; I know now that the angular wheat fields and blank vistas and eerie, lonesome sounds of the Panhandle shaped me as utterly as water informs rock. So mine is a story that begins with the fragments of dreams on the most desolate of prairies, where a child came of age listening to the keening of duststorms drown out the strains of Protestant hymns. No plagues or locusts here: just that residing, familiar emptiness, and the ensuing aches and consolations of the journey out. Is it too much, to feel that the wind carves you in this way? To this day I can hear its howling; I remember, too, being haunted by the stories of pioneer women driven mad by the wind - they simply lay down their brooms, according to legend, and walked out into the vortex, never to be seen again. As a child, I was afraid of the wind as well as the space that allowed for it. The opposite of claustrophobic, I placed my bed in a cramped corner of the room, as far as possible from doors and windows, then burrowed into territories of my own creation. Banned from reading at the dinner table, where I hid books in my lap, I huddled in the closet with a flashlight after bedtime, eschewing sleep for the intoxicating worlds of Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle or Nancy Drew or "Call of the Wild." The older I grew, the more elaborate these other realms became. A shy girl in glasses in a do-nothing town, I lived a thrilling life between the pages of fiction; later, prisoner to adolescence, I wrote poems inspired by Ferlinghetti and saturated with melancholy. Year after year I stared at that bleak horizon and waited for rescue. Which, of course, had already arrived. The edifice of print where I continually lost and found my way was my Chartres pointed skyward.