© 2008
NO PLACE ELSE
by Floyd Wesley Brosman
Reviewed by Dorothy Black
Have you read John Steinbeck’s Grapes of Wrath, that wrenching tale of dustbowl Oklahoma during the Great Depression? If you have, or even if you haven’t, you will be gripped by Wes Brosman’s No Place Else.
Here is a book written from the heart. It is “a memoir told in short stories, based on true events”, as the cover informs us. It is a word-picture of depression years as experienced by the author, a young boy born into hard-scrabble migrant life but dealing also with the struggles and challenges of deafness. His life sometimes took on a desperation that we can only imagine, but the young man persevered, eventually rising high above what was so low. His love of learning eventually gained him an education and a good life. He credits his older brother and some of his teachers for standing by him along the way, but his own philosophies and drive obviously have been his mainstay. In really hard times, he writes, “there is no way to go but up.”
As I read this book I was reminded of Huckleberry Finn, that tale of a boy also dealing with a life of poverty and disadvantage. The stories in No Place Else, too, are often about small day to day concerns that nevertheless have impact, sometimes far beyond their simplicity. The detail in such stories is intriguing and very revealing. We are the child himself, hungry, shoeless, looked down on and scrabbling for enough to keep him alive among the other dustbowl humans. As a further complication, his mother had consumption and was often too ill to care for the family or work for a few cents to buy food. His struggling father was derogatory and unkind, calling him Dummy and mocking his deafness. Despite this, we find these writings to be about a sensitive boy. Yet, he is a boy, managing a few tricks to smooth his way or to get even with someone who has treated him poorly. The stories are well told and hold one’s interest - especially, perhaps, if the reader is of similar vintage and also deafened. They are often painful - for both writer and reader.
These stand-alone No Place Else stories are located in California and Arizona. They are divided into four parts: The Camps - l939-l941, The Junkyards -1941-1943, The War - 1943-1945 and Learning - 1945-1951. The author had many occupations - plumber, truck driver, owner of a small business and so on, threaded through with stints in colleges. It took over twenty years for him to get his bachelor’s degree and he eventually became a teacher. He is a strong advocate for handicapped rights and a great traveller. And oh yes - Wes is a member of SayWhat Club! I hope you enjoy his book as much as I did.
NO PLACE ELSE by Floyd Wesley Brosman
Electric Kitestrings Publishing 2008 - 238 pages www.electrickitestringspublishing.com
ISBN 978-0-9815220-0-5
Available from Amazon.com or from the author at wesbro@olynet.com.