Population: 485

Meeting Your Neighbors One Siren at a Time

Paperback, 256 pages

English language

Published Sept. 30, 2003 by Harper Perennial.

ISBN:
978-0-06-095807-7
Copied ISBN!
OCLC Number:
53336416

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(3 reviews)

Welcome to New Auburn, Wisconsin, where the local vigilante is a farmer's wife armed with a pistol and a Bible, the most senior member of the volunteer fire department is a cross-eyed butcher with one kidney and two ex-wives (both of whom work at the only gas station in town), and the back roads are haunted by the ghosts of children and farmers. Against a backdrop of fires and tangled wrecks, bar fights and smelt feeds, Population: 485 is a comic and sometimes heartbreaking true tale leavened with quieter meditations on an overlooked America.

6 editions

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There was a sense of familiarity, as Perry writes about the town he grew up in - the same town he returned to - and the people who live there. I came from a smallish town - 10 times the size of New Auburn - but the coziness of it all is similar to what I remember growing up, and to what my husband relays about his small-town life.

The characters in the book seem almost too good to be real. It would be a good work of fiction; it's even better that it's not.

Just a warning - bring a box of tissues for the end.

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Subjects

  • Travel
  • 20th Century American Prose
  • Biography / Autobiography
  • Biography/Autobiography
  • Medical - General
  • Personal Memoirs
  • Special Interest - Adventure
  • Travel / Adventure