Get Poor Now Avoid the Rush: The Life and Times of Henry Buckberry

Description: Its hard to say exactly whats meant by the modern world but Henry Buckberry never really hooked into it. Born before the First World War and the oldest boy in a family of thirteen kids he left the open rolling potholed prairie of North Dakota in 1921 for the dark dense dangerous woods of northern Wisconsin where he learned to fish trap hunt lumberjack and farm. Although he lived into the twenty-first century (the second volume of these stories A Windfall Homestead will inch us closer to the information super-highway) it could be said that Henry played hooky from the twentieth. With a few allowances for a little new technology like the Model T Henrys life represents the end phase of a rural folk culture that has its roots in the Neolithic. Through Henrys stories its possible to see a long way into the past and then to turn the telescope around in order to put the present under an improvised microscope. Henry didnt have an easy life but he had a vivid life a life amazingly free of boredom aimlessness or distraction and his stories convey that vividness from beginning to end. Henrys son Charles Darwin Buckberry--also known as C.D. or Seedy Buckberry--interviewed Henry and arranged the stories in some sort of more or less working order. (Seedy insists he put those stories down with complete fidelity although he refuses to take a lie-detector test or submit to a Minnesota Multi-Phasic Personality Inventory analysis.) Henrys life as conveyed here is also a way to measure the intellectual bulimia (or is it the intellectual anorexia?) of present-day empire consumerism. Here is life before Wal-Mart. Here is life that lives in nature with intense and even fierce physicality. Here is life that sings. About the Contributor(s): Seedy Buckberry is a recluse who lives in the Wisconsin woods. There are allegations that he knows is related to or even impersonates a querulous writer with the improbable nom de plume of Paul Gilk whose several books have been published by Wipf and Stock. Seedy categorically denies these allegations and is reported to be offended by the insinuation that hes not who he thinks he is.