Reviews

• George Sessions Perry's Hold Autumn in Your Hand is a classic piece of Texas literature. He writes in a style that allows the reader to whiz through the pages, and makes you fall in love with the characters and their problems. Sam Tucker is a hardworking and decent tenant farmer during the Depression. He is trying to get his family out of the duldrums they have found themselves in the last few years. He finally gets some luck when he is allowed to farm a piece of land that has enough acreage to make a profit. With one neighbor helping him every step of the way and another trying to thwart his attempts to prosper, Sam is able to use his optimism and will power to succeed as a tenant farmer during the Depression. I loved the story pertaining to his neighbors cow, along with his quest to catch the giant fish (one hilarious and the other filled with mixed emotions). There are some classic characters riddled throughout Hold Autumn in Your Hand (the grandma for example) and some funny scenarios, which make this a must read for anyone. Everyone enjoy!

• It seemed to be a fairly accurate account of the times. Wish there was more to read about the family.

• Once the reader falls into the steady, slow rhythms of Perry's novel about an impoverished Texas farmer of the 1930s, the book becomes almost compulsively readable. It has little action other than Sam Tucker's quest to tame nature and to wrest a living from the Texas soil, yet the novel evokes a sense of drama and of real accomplishment. A key passage highlights for me the fact that Perry has a social agenda. He is an idealist who believes that cooperation among human beings is essential for our species' survival. Call him a populist or a dirt-road socialist, but don't forget this, on Page 136: "Once you knew what Sam knew, that ignorance and disease, the blackness of the night and the terror of the storm, were the great eternal enemies of man, there could be no tolerance for those who sought to replace the processes of patient reason by violence, joint effort by war. . . . If salvation, in the form of progress and fulfillment, were ever to come to men, it must come through intelligent trust, by rising above fear, abd by means of the natural affection of man for man that automatically occurs when fear is removed, like the emergence of green leaves when winter is over." This unforgettably expresses the best of the sentiments that grew out of the Great Depression.

• Loved this book , i wanted my own copy

• George Sessions Perry was an author in the small Texas town in which I grew up. His writing reflects the struggles sharecroppers endured in the years following the Great Depression. I personally related to a lot of the experiences related.

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