Doug's Good Books

Culture is everywhere.  But it's a patchwork quilt, far more than it is an elegant pyramid of hierarchical relationships all purposefully and consciously aimed at the highest culture ... the greatest good.  Willis' book drove this home for me.  In it I learned new ways of looking at my past; the pattern of my own blue-collar childhood.  The one that still so strongly influences my ideas, for good and for ill.  Willis deftly sews together the pieces of so many broken and wasted lives.  Lives that he allows to speak in their own language: real people saying real things about real lives.  It's a sad story, mostly ... but, there are many things said in it that make me so fondly remember the honor and the courage of the best of these people ... even if those times and those antics have been lost forever; as all cultures are mere fleeting glimpses.  Maybe it's not so much a book about a *class* culture, after all.  Maybe it's just about a *youth* culture?  Yes, that's its underlying poignancy: all us kids gotta grow up.