"Man Killed By Pheasant & Other Kinships" by John T. Price (Da Capo Press,
ISBN 9780306816055, $25.00)
I picked up John T. Price's memoir after hearing him speak at April's
Midwest Booksellers Association meeting in Des Moines—he was such an
easygoing and eloquent speaker I was drawn to his book even though it's
outside my usual fictional comfort zone. I wasn't disappointed.
"Man Killed By Pheasant" is a series of interconnected essays about Price's
life, family, and Iowa, the native land he tried to leave for decades before
realizing it was home. Anecdotes amusing and heartbreaking crowd the page:
his adventures as a maintenance man for an apartment complex that—after his
soft heart becomes known—becomes a haven for illegal pets; his senile
grandfather's escape into memories of a second, more exciting life, full of
bear-wrestling and cross-country escapes; his mounting grief for the lost
habitats and biomes of Iowa, where only a tenth of one percent of the
state's area remains ecologically native. My favorite piece, "Dave and the
Devil," follows Price's cousin on the lecture circuit as an expert on
Satanism and student-initiated violence. Dave's disgust at widespread ritual
mutilation and animal sacrifice is tempered by his tolerance and compassion
for the outcast and frustrated teenagers responsible for most of it.
Price understands how to distill real life into narrative, finding
epiphanies both small and great. In the title chapter, a young pheasant
unexpectedly flies into Price's car window as he drives along Highway 30,
scaring man and bird half to death; but it's this unexpected collision of
nature and technology that spurs Price to learn more about the flora and
fauna that populated Iowa before it was plowed under. "Man Killed By
Pheasant" is an asset to the creative non-fiction genre, and the literature
of the Midwest.
Review by Anna
Perleberg, May 22, 2008
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