I noticed I'm only the second one to review THE ATTIC (on Amazon.com) and have to confess that I read the other review by W. Giersbach. Now if I were one of those lazy kids I remember from my high school English classes who had to get up and recite after a particularly smart student had, I would just point and say, as those dumb kids used to say, "What he said." Because I agree with Giersbach - and then some.

But this is a memoir that covers a lot of territory. Harnack's first memoir, WE HAVE ALL GONE AWAY, was itself a beautiful remembrance of growing up on a farm years ago, which stressed the importance of family, both nuclear and extended. It brought to mind a Michigan farm memoir penned by another Curtis. Curtis Stadtfeld's FROM THE LAND AND BACK was about a Catholic boyhood. Curtis Harnack's is about a Lutheran one. Ironically, both boys were taught, as I was, to distrust those other faiths. Now, years later, we discover we were all pretty much the same, nurtured by strong family ties and love and kept firmly in line by early-inculcated doses of Lutheran or Catholic (or any ol' kind of Calvinist or Protestant) guilt. Harnack speaks eloquently of the importance of faith and family, and then, when he leaves home for first college and then the navy (and then college again), he waxes equally eloquent on struggles with sin and sex and all the other problems associated with emerging from the comfortable cocoon of a large family and insular small-town life.

The tales in this second memoir emerge from the bittersweet chore of cleaning out the attic of the home where he grew up as part of a large group of siblings and cousins, grandparents and aunts and uncles. As he sorts through a few generations' worth of stuff he finds aunts' diaries and letters, old newspapers and church bulletins - all of which unleash memories: of fires and Fourth of July holidays, preachers, odd neighbors, family relationships. But my own favorite section of the book is the chapter called "This Stranger in Uniform" in which, prompted by finding a packet of his own letters home from the navy, he remembers his military service at the tail end of World War II. What Harnack tells here is not what is "in" the letters, but, more accurately, what is "not." He says, "...my letter-writing voice cozens the home folks readers, telling not what I feel but rather what their notion of my reactions should be." This comes after a letter telling his folks what a "beautiful show" the then-current movie STATE FAIR was. He then tells us, "Everything I knew about rural life indicated the film was a lie ... Mostly movies were not expected to be about anything one knew, which made STATE FAIR particularly offensive." His tales of being on liberty in the "big city" of Chicago ring particularly and even traumatically true, as he tells of street-corner hookers, fumbling with girls in unsuccessful attempts to relieve himself of the burden of virginity, his bunk-mates' boastful tales of "rolling queers" and his own frightening near-miss with a predatory homosexual.

Harnack went through all these rites of passage mostly in the Chicago area; for me, nearly twenty years later, it was Boston and other places. I have already written my own accounts of all these things in memoirs of my own. But if I had not, I might easily turn and point to the young Iowan that Harnack was back then and say, "What he said. Yeah." - Tim Bazzett, author of SOLDIER BOY: AT PLAY IN THE ASA ( )

3341. The Attic: A Memoir, by Curtis Harnack (read 31 Aug. 2000) This is another book read because Curtis Harnack was born and raised in northwest Iowa, and some of his growing up experiences parallel mine--and some do not. He is a year older than I am, and I can relate to most of what he tells. I found the book engaging, heavy on reflection on the passing scene. And enjoyed it. ( )