The Hue and Cry at Our House: A Year Remembered
Benjamin Taylor's The Hue and Cry at Our House: A Year Remembered is a memoir that traces family and personal memory through the year around Kennedy's assassination. Beginning with childhood experience, it quietly layers family life, loss, and the atmosphere of an era.
Work Information
A memoir that follows one year around the Kennedy assassination.
Published by Penguin, this memoir uses one personal year as an entry point into the overlap between family history and American history. Its restrained style shows how private memory can be tied to a larger historical moment.
Book Information
- Publisher
- Penguin Books
- Published
- 2017-05-23
- Pages
- 208 pages
- Language
- 英語
- Size
- 12.95 x 1.27 x 19.56 cm
- ISBN-13
- 9780143131649
- ISBN-10
- 0143131648
- Price
- 2739 JPY
- Category
- 洋書/Biographies & Memoirs/Cultural & Regional
The award-winning memoir of one tumultuous year of boyhood in Fort Worth, Texas, opening with a handshake with JFK, and recalling the changes and revelations of the months that followed. Winner of the LA Times Christopher Isherwood Prize for Autobiographical Prose, and a New York Times Editor's Choice. “A marvel of a book—elegant, touching, singular.” —Mary Karr “ Brief and moving . . . An elegantly written book, erudite, perceptive and at times painfully candid.”— Moira Hodgson, Wall Street Journal After John F. Kennedy’s speech in front of the Hotel Texas in Fort Worth on November 22, 1963, he was greeted by, among others, an 11-year-old Benjamin Taylor and his mother waiting to shake his hand. Only a few hours later, Taylor’s teacher called the class in from recess and, through tears, told them of the president’s assassination. From there Taylor traces a path through the next twelve months, recalling the tumult as he saw everything he had once considered stable begin to grow more complex. Looking back on the love and tension within his family, the childhood friendships that lasted and those that didn’t, his memories of summer camp and family trips, he reflects upon the outsized impact our larger American story had on his own. Benjamin Taylor is one of the most talented writers working today. In lyrical, translucent prose, he thoughtfully extends the story of twelve months into the years before and after, painting a portrait of the artist not simply as a young man, but across his whole life. As he writes, “[A]ny twelve months could stand for the whole. Our years are so implicated in one another that the least important is important enough . . . Any year I chose would show the same mettle, the same frailties stamping me at eleven and twelve.”
Benjamin Taylor 's memoir, The Hue and Cry at Our House won the 2017 Los Angeles Times /Christopher Isherwood Prize for Autobiography and was named a New York Times Editors' Choice; his Proust: The Search was named a Best Book of 2015 by Thomas Mallon in The New York Times Book Review and by Robert McCrum in The Observer (London); and his Naples Declared: A Walk Around the Bay was named a Best Book of 2012 by Judith Thurman in The New Yorker . He is also the author of two novels, Tales Out of School, winner of the 1996 Harold Ribalow Prize, and The Book of Getting Even, winner of a 2009 Barnes & Noble Discover Award, as well as a book-length essay, Into the Open . He edited Saul Bellow: Letters , named a Best Book of 2010 by Michiko Kakutani in The New York Times and Jonathan Yardley in The Washington Post , and Bellow's There Is Simply Too Much to Think About: Collected Nonfiction , also a New York Times Editors' Choice. His edition of the collected stories of Susan Sontag, Debriefing , was published by Farrar, Straus & Giroux in November 2017. He is currently under contract to Penguin for a sequel to The Hue and Cry at Our House . Taylor is a founding faculty member in the New School’s Graduate School of Writing and teaches also in the Columbia University School of the Arts. He is a past fellow and current trustee of the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation and serves as president of the Edward F. Albee Foundation.
Reviews
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Wonderful writing, humorous touching memoir, and not spoiled by sentimentality or over dramatization. With very deft strokes, the author brings us into his home where we get to know him, his family and his friends. Some events in the year following the sobering opening of the book (1963-1964) are LOL funny, but the clarity of writing and Mr. Taylor's absolute awareness of who he is, makes this a most enjoyable and quick read. I highly recommend it.
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Or, why anybody else but myself should be responsible for all my troubles! But I really liked Benjamin’s book! But I’m reluctant to talk about anything further, because I’m still so upset about the murder of Bobby Franks! And every time I think about what happened, I start to cry! As a matter of fact, I stopped reading the book at about page 125; at the start of Chapter 7 called, Lake Effect. And tossed the book aside, but not thrown away across the room for good; still, I wasn’t sure how long or if I would ever finish reading the book because I was so distressed! And I didn’t know why, or who was to blame for my overall discomfort. In his book, Benjamin Taylor was reading a book his teacher had recommended; The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. But I disagreed somewhat with the author’s curt conclusion: ‘Huck Finn, that situational ethicist, became my moral teacher, which he had remained. Trust your adulterated nature and do what comes handiest at the time.’ Because this affirmation came after the terrible story in the previous chapter about these 2 genius idiots who tried to commit the perfect crime, just for the thrill. Yet, I wasn’t bothered when the author previously admitted he was an atheist. Or, when he considered the strange coincidence that he & his older brother shared sinistrality; whereby Tommy & Benjamin were both left-handed; but that Tommy was straight & Benjamin was gay. What bothered me the most was what the author suggested at the end of chapter 5 about the ‘crime of the century’ in 1924 & especially his assumption w/regard to both those teenager perpetrators who happened to be gay lovers. ‘But maybe there was something fatal on the nature side too. An unnamable miasma hung over (those egotistical murderers), unnamable by me then but soon to be named, and those two psychopaths were the least favorable introduction to grown-up homosexuality that chance could have thrown my way. In a flash I understood that I was their kin, shared their nature and was capable of anything.’ No! And just because they were gay & you are gay, doesn’t imply that you are equally capable of any such crime that dare not speak its name! A false premise, in my opinion! So, go sit over there by your book in the corner & think about that for an hour! And I haven’t had the heart or inclination to pick up his book any time soon, to finish the story, because I am consumed by despair about such senseless depravity that started just after Bobby supposedly hesitated to get in the car, when he was so close to home, but ultimately did because he knew his 2 neighbors & they had mentioned something about his favorite pastime, tennis. But then it was too late for Bobby & the rest is history. And too sad for me to repeat! Yet, we should remember & forewarn kids to always trust their instincts & never do anything that appears suspicious, because you’re not at fault until it’s too late & can’t go back to fix the conundrum, because you could be kidnapped & killed! I eventually finished The Hue and Cry at Our House by Benjamin Taylor. And highly recommend his very smart & stylish, albeit smallish book with <200 pages, but full of clever consternation about a young-adult life in the midst of so much turmoil that started on or about November 22nd 1963 in Dallas, TX. Book review by Jack Dunsmoor, author of the forthcoming book: Letters 2 Lance – asking advice from a proactive vlogger & fellow traveler.
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I bought this book simply because I am a devoted JFK fanatic. It goes far beyond shaking JFKs hand on the morning of his asasination. It is a fascinating growing of age story of a Jewish boy in Texas - from his reaction to the murder to his arrival at seniority..Mr Taylor's wisdom and wit is supremely and gloriously demonstrated in this small volumn.
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Some portions were poignant and others quite moving. Overall, however, this was not an engaging read.
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The Best book I have read this year! Very well written, interesting (Kennedy's assassination). For sure, I will read again.