{"product_id":"9780143135333","title":"A Childhood: The Biography of a Place","description":"\u003cp\u003e\u003ci\u003eA Childhood\u003c\/i\u003e is the unforgettable memoir of Harry Crews' earliest years, a sharply remembered portrait of the people, locales, and circumstances that shaped him—and destined him to be a storyteller. Crews was born in the middle of the Great Depression, in a one-room sharecropper's cabin at the end of a dirt road in rural South Georgia. If Bacon County was a place of grinding poverty, poor soil, and blood feuds, it was also a deeply mystical place, where snakes talked, birds could possess a small boy by spitting in his mouth, and faith healers and conjure women kept ghosts and devils at bay.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eAt once shocking and elegiac, heartrending and comical, \u003ci\u003eA Childhood\u003c\/i\u003e not only recalls the transforming events of Crews's youth but conveys his growing sense of self in a world \"in which survival depended on raw courage, a courage born out of desperation and sustained by a lack of alternatives.\"\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eAmid portraits of relatives and neighbors, Bacon County lore, and details of farm life, Crews tells of his father's death; his friendship with Willalee Bookatee, the son of a black hired hand; his bout with polio; his mother and stepfather's failing marriage; his near-fatal scalding at a hog-killing; and a five-month sojourn in Jacksonville, Florida. These and other memories define, with reverence and affection, Harry Crews's childhood world: \"its people and its customs and all its loveliness and all its ugliness.\" Imaginative and gripping, \u003ci\u003eA Childhood\u003c\/i\u003e re-creates in detail one writer's search for past and self, a search for a time and place lost forever except in memory.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Penguin Publishing Group","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":47022285193456,"sku":"9780143135333","price":16.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0737\/7593\/9824\/files\/9780143135333_p0.jpg?v=1769914453","url":"https:\/\/shop-qa.barnesandnoble.com\/products\/9780143135333","provider":"Barnes \u0026 Noble (DEV)","version":"1.0","type":"link"}