Into the Woods
Keywords:
book review, Robert J. Begiebing, memoir, childhood memories, sense of placeAbstract
Michael L. Shuman reviews Robert J. Begiebing’s A Berkshire Boyhood, a memoir of growing up in 1950s Williamstown, Massachusetts. Shuman follows the book’s main threads: the shaping force of the Berkshire landscape, the complicated figure of Begiebing’s father, and the break with Catholicism that led him to find the sacred in nature. He also links the memoir’s unsupervised childhood adventures to current debates about overprotective parenting, and he compares them with his own boyhood in West Virginia and the recent death of his father.
