Gone to the Woods (Gary Paulsen)

Gone to the Woods: Surviving a Lost Childhood
Gary Paulsen
Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Nonfiction, MG? Memoir
****+ (Good/Great)

DESCRIPTION: For decades, author Gary Paulsen wrote many mesmerizing stories, several influenced by his long and unusual life and rough childhood. Here, he relates tales that never made it directly into his other works, incidents and memories that shaped him from a young child through his time as a young man in the Army, from his time at his aunt's remote farm to his years in postwar Manila, from a struggling schoolboy to an eager devourer of library books... and eventual crafter of his own stories.

REVIEW: When the world lost Gary Paulsen, it lost a true treasure, and a window into a mindset and lifestyle that has become increasingly endangered in modern times. He has hinted, in previous books, about various events in his life, but never collected these particular tales (though he does talk a bit about some of these events in books like Guts and This Side of Wild, and the afterwords to some of his fictional works). It starts when "the boy" (oddly, he chose to write his memoir in third person) is five years old; his mother, in Chicago to work in a factory during wartime while her husband is overseas, has become a bar regular (with numerous "uncles" vying for her attention), and encourages him to sing on tabletops to attract attention and garner free drinks, until Gary's grandmother gets wind of the situation and snatches the child away to live with relatives in the deep woods. The solo train journey, among cars full of wounded servicemen back from the front lines, leaves an indelible mark on his young psyche, and is also his first introduction to the green world of the forests that would dominate so much of his future, a spiritual connection he feels the moment he locks eyes with a black bear from the train window. Paulsen, as always, manages to evoke a strong, almost spiritual sense of the world around him, from the green paradise of his summer with his aunt Edith and uncle Sig in the green woods to the nightmare of watching sharks tear into plane crash victims on the Pacific ocean and the bomb-cratered city of Manila, where the stains (and bodies) of Japanese occupation still fill the caves and litter the jungle, even to the Hell of his brutal alcoholic home life and the unexpected sanctuary of the town library. As a final book, this makes a fitting last bow, even as it remains clear that there are many more stories where these came from that will now never be told.

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