If you liked "Billy Ray's Farm", you'll like this one too. More of Brown's straight to the heart writing. ( )

Book #806 in my old book database. Not rated.

Larry Brown, a Mississippi fireman, wrote these recollections which include some heart-warming stories in addition to the mind-numbingly tragic ones. In one case, his company had been called to a trailer fire. The trailer was half-destroyed when they arrived — “They always are”, — but fortunately no one was home. They discovered puppy on the floor with all the classic signs of death: eyes glazed over and bowels evacuated. They carried him out, and one of the firemen remarked how they had all the lifesaving equipment along, why not give the puppy a shot. They slid the oxygen tube in the puppy’s mouth and amazingly he came out of it. Not all of the stories are as pleasant. “Some of the boys on another shift, just playing around out of boredom and in good-natured [!:] fun, tie one of the nozzlemen into a rolling chair with lots of rope and push him off down Price Hill into traffic. They say his screams were something to behold.”

Brown's early death was a tragedy. ( )

I love Larry Brown's writing. So simple, yet so affecting and evocative. This collection of autobiographical tales was written as a reflection on the time in his life from the '70s to the early 90s as an Oxford Fire Department member in Mississippi. That alone would be good enough - his stories tell of the unique esprit de corps in the fire station and of the many harrowing emergencies they would attend. But this book is more than just this. Brown writes of what that life was like as a colleague among the truest of friends, as a professional - sure of his abilities and confident in his training and equipment, as a man coping with moments of life, death and devastation on a routine basis, and as a husband and father living a blue collar existence in a simple home doing simple things.

It is these latter recollections which penetrated the most - you feel the soul of the man as he tells of half-hearted hunting expeditions with his sons, planting trees with his buddies in a snowy January landscape, or the heartbreaking episode of the disappearing kittens and the stuggle to settle with himself the ethics of raising rabbits for profit.

Intermittently he makes reference to his private passion - writing - and his efforts to fit that parallel vocation in with his home and work lives. These tiny insights are fascinating, and truly give an indication of what kind of a man he was.
Highly recommended. ( )