An Open Book: Coming of Age in the Heartland

"All that kid wants to do is stick his nose in a book," Michael Dirda's steelworker father used to complain, worried about his son's passion for reading. In this memoir, acclaimed literary journalist and Pulitzer Prize-winning critic Dirda re-creates his boyhood in rust-belt Ohio, first in the working-class town of Lorain, then at Oberlin College. In addition to his colorful family and friends, An Open Book also features the great writers and fictional characters who fueled Dirda's imagination: from Green Lantern to Sherlock Holmes, from Candy to Proust. The result is an affectionate homage to small-town America in the 1950s and 1960s--Slavic wedding feasts, catechism classes, summer jobs in the steel mill, school fights, sweepstakes contests, first dates, and a canary-yellow Mustang--as well as to what could arguably be called the last great age of reading.--From publisher description.