About this item
Highlights
- In this Boomer memoir, Driving Miss Daisy meets One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest.
- Author(s): Summer Brenner
- 280 Pages
- Biography + Autobiography, Jewish
Description
About the Book
"My brother David and I were born to a Jewish family in Atlanta in the 1940s. Who knows why a thing roots in memory, but my early consciousness was formed by corners of wool blankets sucked until the fiber shredded; sheets hung over card tables to make hiding places; knees skinned raw in tomboy pursuits; a deep bond with my cousin Nancy; summer nights on sweat-drenched pillows; a recurring nightmare of being chased; the delight of nakedness; deep loneliness; and books, books, books. Like most siblings, David and I played together. But more often, I was alone"--Book Synopsis
In this Boomer memoir, Driving Miss Daisy meets One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest. With lilting eloquence, Summer Brenner captures the tumultuous fifties and sixties of a genteel Jewish family in Atlanta, with the South's oppressive segregation and anti-Semitism. The family drama is fraught: the brother is a schizophrenic, the mother a Gucci-clad Medusa, and the father a suicide. After extensive travels, Brenner frees herself in the Bay Area to become "more beatnik than debutante." Framed by historic events, this is the moving coming-of-age story of a generation.
Review Quotes
In this Boomer memoir, Driving Miss Daisy meets One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest. With lilting eloquence, Summer Brenner captures the tumultuous fifties and sixties of a genteel Jewish family in Atlanta, with the South's oppressive segregation and anti-Semitism. The family drama is fraught: the brother is a schizophrenic, the mother a Gucci-clad Medusa, and the father a suicide. After extensive travels, Brenner frees herself in the Bay Area to become "more beatnik than debutante." Framed by historic events, this is the moving coming-of-age story of a generation.
James Nolan, author of Flight Risk: Memoirs of a New Orleans Bad Boy
My life has been just a little bit enlightened by meeting David, Summer Brenner's brother and the ultimate subject of this poignant memoir. Through her words I feel that I've come to know the man, his idiosyncrasies, his charm, his knack for breaking an awkward silence with sudden bursts of song. When the book was finished I felt as if I'd lost someone close, someone I used to know as a child, reintroduced in his dying days. In learning to know David, I feel like I know a little bit more about Summer, too. Her story is a great tribute, though sometimes harsh as honesty often is, to her father, mother, brother and the people she came to meet in a life centered in the beating heart of a bygone era.
Stephen Jay Schwartz, Los Angeles Times bestselling author of Boulevard and Beat
I spent the holidays in Georgia and decided to read DUST straight through, the whole thing, sitting beside the river that cuts across the land near my father's little shack in the woods. It is, truly, a beautiful and marvelous book. The writing is powerful and polished; in places it almost feels liturgical in its careful and incisive repetition. And what a joy to also learn about a Georgia that simultaneously felt so familiar and so distinct from the one I grew up in. And about your own ambivalences with your mother, your brother, your father. I cannot begin to tell you what a gift it was.
Levi Vonk, author of Border Hacker: A Tale of Treachery, Trafficking, and Two Friends on the Run
Brenner is clear-eyed and unsparing in her portrayals of her family, herself, and the many characters whom she encounters. Tenderness is reserved for her brother whom she tries to help as he descends into paranoid schizophrenia. It's not easy to read this book yet it rises above the personal as a compelling chronicle of a time and place in the mid-20th century world.
Tom Weidlinger, The Restless Hungarian, Modernism, Madness and the American Dream