Stepping Around the Cowcatcher

Henry Gallagher, a Minneapolis native "out east" for years, returns to his hometown. With the help of twenty-nine of his former high-school classmates (whom he calls co-storytellers), the author writes of their "wonder years" (ages five to fifteen), growing up in the south Minneapolis neighborhoods of the 1940s and '50s. He walks down the hallways of his grade school, out onto its playground, down the alleys and into the backyards of his childhood, telling stories of the awakening years, some of them dark. It was a time, he writes, when "a lot of us cried on our first day of kindergarten, played summertime kick the can and wintertime pom-pom pullaway, pretty much didn't know where babies came from and were thrilled to be making money on our first jobs." One reviewer, Samuel Hynes-himself a Minneapolis expat of years-wrote, "Every anecdote has the authority of personal experience: yes it was like that then, being a kid in that happy place."