Book Report.

Book Report

To be quite honest, I have had enough of books bloviating about the wealthy and the very pretty. Women with thin yoga bodies. Independently wealthy men. Fairy tales of idealist privileged people with unlimited resources and above average education. Too many books out there including improbable scenarios such as CEO’s and their spouses and driven in bullet proof Rolls-Royces by uniformed body guards. No, I don’t want that. I do not relate.
I want a book narrative about people who had to sweat and toil or even die to get where they or their love ones wanted to go. People by their own initiative or ingenuity make it by the seat of their pants. Gutsy or driven by fear. Maybe a guy who might be a bit pudgy with thinning hair and willing to take a chance and make his own life by sweat, blood, and tears. Well, I think I found one of those books. Title Raised in Ruins, a memoir by Tara Neilson. Non-fiction biography. 2020.

Library of Congress annotation:
“In the 1980s the Neilson family moved out on a floathouse to the remote site of a former cannery in Southeast Alaska that had burned to the ground before statehood. They were miles away from any neighbors, surrounded on all sides by wolves, bears and other wildlife, entering the world of subsistence living in an uninviting land of dangerous weather and storms; yet the Neilsons were able to make themselves a home where few others would have found possible. Led by a jack-of-all-trades handyman for a father and a mother who was afraid of everything in the wilderness, Tara and her four siblings cleared the rough terrain to build atop the blackened, rusty ruins a new way of life that was completely their own. From a young age, Tara learned that anything was possible, so long as one can imagine it and then make it happen.
Again, the book: “Raised in Ruins.”
Plenty of ups and downs. Starts and stops. Successes and failures. But certainly, a lot to relate to. Read it. You’ll like it. Sorry, no romance. Just hard boil living.