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Title details for Andy Catlett by Wendell Berry - Available

Andy Catlett

Early Travels: A Novel

by Wendell Berry
Paul Michael
Audiobook
82 of 82 copies available
Borrow Listen to a sample Listen to a sample
82 of 82 copies available
Berry opens this latest installment of the Port William series with young Andy Catlett preparing to visit a place he'd been to many times before, though this would be an adventure he will take very seriously. Nine years old, Andy embarks on the trip by bus, alone for the first time. He decides it will be a rite of passage and his first step into manhood. Sometimes a handful at home, Andy was a good boy when visiting his Grandparents' houses, and he looked forward to the little spoiling certain to come his way. A beautiful short novel, this book is a perfect introduction into the whole world of Port William and will be as well a new chapter for those already familiar with this rich unfolding story.

  • Creators

  • Series

    Port William

  • Publisher

  • Release date

    March 1, 2008

  • Formats

    • OverDrive Listen audiobook

      • ISBN: 9781596445321
      • File size: 119732 KB
      • Duration: 04:09:26

  • Languages

    • English

  • Reviews

    • AudioFile Magazine
      For fifty years, Wendell Berry has created stories of life in the fictional town of Port William, Kentucky and shared them with readers. Although fictional, we recognize the characters . . .as real our own ancestors. This memoir-like tale gives us a view of that point in time when we slid from an agrarian to an industrialized society. After Christmas 1943, 9-year-old Andy Catlett makes his first solo visit to Port William. Paul Michael, as an elderly Andy, reflects on that memorable visit to his paternal grandparents, farmers, and his maternal ones, who lived in town. Speaking in a voice full of down-home wisdom, Michael creates an atmosphere in which we can imagine sitting in the company of our own grandpa, soaking up his history, which, by extension, is our own. N.E.M. (c) AudioFile 2008, Portland, Maine
    • Publisher's Weekly

      November 20, 2006
      Readers familiar with rural Kentucky novelist (A Place on Earth
      ), poet (A Timbered Choir
      ) and essayist (Another Turn of the Crank
      ) Berry and his vast repertoire will feel right at home in this slim, memoirlike novel narrated by the elderly Andy Catlett. In the winter of 1943, at age nine, young Andy is allowed to set out alone by bus from his home in Hargrave to Port William, 10 miles away, where both his parents grew up. After coffee at the bus station (a nickel) and quick trip, he is retrieved by his grandfather Catlett's mule team, driven by longtime hired black servant, Dick Watson. Andy's observations of his grandmother's unfussy cooking and the men's work stripping tobacco in the barn is full of nostalgic, admiring detail. Dick and Andy visit Dick's wife, Aunt Sarah Jane, whose superstitions and acute perception of racial inequity "introduced the fester of it into the conscience of a small boy." At a visit to his mother's more modernized family farm, the absence of Uncle Virgil fighting overseas is grievously felt, and Andy is allowed to listen to the radio before sleeping. "The world I knew as a boy was flawed, surely," Berry writes wisely, "but it was substantial and authentic."

Formats

  • OverDrive Listen audiobook

subjects

Languages

  • English

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