Summary
"My name is David Burkett. I'm actually the fourth in line of David Burketts beginning in the 1860s..." But "this naming process is of no particular interest except to illustrate how fathers wish to further dominate the lives of their sons from the elemental beginnings." [Jim Harrison] takes us to his own original home, the Upper Peninsula in Michigan, and introduces us to a family of timber barons which has done its best to defoliate the whole area in the process of making money. He has come home to tackle class, patriarchy, the effects of a father "so purely awful that he was a public joke in our area" on both family and environment, and the guilt that goes with ownership and knowledge of past crimes. David and his sister Cynthia are in full revolt against their family and its expectations, against the alcoholic country-club carelessness of their forbears, the easy, bored acceptance of their own flaws, against the code of exploitation and self-justification that has long underpinned the excesses of American capitalism. Cynthia does it successfully, is a fearless rebel from early childhood and is a wonderfully realized character, feisty, daring, loving.
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Extract
True North; Jim Harrison
The first half page of Jim Harrison's new novel puts the reader in shock, delivering an image that will haunt and puzzle throughout the entire book, rather as a nightmare and its images can echo through a day to erupt at unlikely moments, cre...
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