Crunching Gravel
by Robert Louis Peters
No nostalgic tale of the good old days, Robert Peters's recollections of his adolescence vividly evoke the Depression on a hardscrabble farm near Eagle River: Dad driving the Vilas County Relief truck, Lars the Swede freezing to death on his porch, the embarassment of graduation in a suit from welfare. The hard efforts to put fish and potatoes and blueberries on the table are punctuated by occasional pleasures: the Memorial Day celebration, swimming at Perch Lake, the county fair with Mother's prizes for jam and the exotic delights of the midway. Peters's clear-eyed memoir reveals a poet's eye for rich and stark detail even as a boy of twelve."Peters misses nothing, from the details of the town's Fourth of July celebration to the cause and effect of a young cousin's suicide to the calibrations of racism toward Indians that was so acceptable then. It is a fascinating, unsentimental look at a piece of our past."—Margaret E. Guthrie, New York Times Book...