Tom and Huck Don't Live Here Anymore: Childhood and Murder in the Heart of America - Softcover

Powers, Ron

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0312303246 ISBN 13: 9780312303242

Publisher: St. Martin's Griffin, 2002

Synopsis

Ron Powers' hometown is Hannibal, Missouri, home of Mark Twain, and therefore birthplace of our image of boyhood itself. Powers returns to Hannibal to chronicle the horrific story of two killings, both committed by minors, and the trials that followed. Seamlessly weaving the narrative of the events in Hannibal with the national withering of the very concept of childhood, Powers exposes a fragmented adult society where children are left adrift, transforming isolation into violence.

From a Pulitzer Prize-winning author, Tom and Huck Don't Live Here Anymore is a powerful, disturbing, and eye-opening dispatch from the homefront that will take its place alongside the works of Antony Lucas, Robert Coles, and Tracy Kidder.

About this title

Review

This book is at once an engrossing story of murder in a small American town and a profound meditation on the meaning of childhood in modern America. Ron Powers, co-author of Flags of Our Fathers, returns to Hannibal, Missouri--the boyhood home of Mark Twain, and also where Powers grew up--after learning about two local teenage killers. The very notion of it shook him: "In addition to their human victims, small-town killings assault ... the myth of the hearth, the safe inner circle that protects a loving enclave against the cruelties of a barbarous world." He goes on to describe "a world of absent or dimly connected adults" and how adolescents fall into the grip of a deep meaninglessness and whose "daily movements might easily begin with a search for a better brand of cigarette and end with a shotgun murder." Most of Tom and Huck Don't Live Here Anymore is a tale of two true crimes, though it's also punctuated by autobiography and full of Twain references. Hard to put down because the writing is so good, the book is hard to forget because its message is so troubling. --John Miller

About the Author

Ron Powers is the co-writer of The New York Times bestseller Flags of Our Father and the author of eight books, including Dangerous Water, a biography of young Samuel Clemens. Winner of the Pulitzer Prize for criticism, he lives in Middlebury, Vermont.

Edition details

• Publisher: St. Martin's Griffin
• Publication date: 2002
• ISBN 10: 0312303246
• ISBN 13: 9780312303242
• Binding: Paperback
• Language: English
• Number of pages: 336