Boy with Loaded Gun: A Memoir

Boy with Loaded Gun: A Memoir
Average customer rating:

Some things don't need telling

Nordan's double helping of alcoholism, fantasy, and loss

good...not great

fine work from a fine writer

Tremendous Style But Little Substance

Boy with Loaded Gun: A Memoir
Lewis Nordan
Manufacturer: Algonquin Books
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover

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In only the first of many profoundly self-destructive acts in his memoir Boy with Loaded Gun, Lewis "Buddy" Nordan dons a Superman cape, shrieks in excitement at the arrival of his family's new TV, and leaps off his porch as if to fly. A few seconds later, his forehead strikes the concrete, Buddy is laid out cold, and a number of all-too-enduring patterns have taken root, including a lifelong fascination with power and fathers and flight. To Nordan's credit, he doesn't knock you over the head with the metaphorical implications of this or any of the other escapades that follow. Instead, he lets one improbably cinematic vignette build on another: the time he met his alcoholic father's midget ex-girlfriend; the time he ran away to New York and was rescued from his own drunkenness by a suspiciously short elevator operator; the time he mail-ordered a gun. ("Eventually I tried to kill my father, of course.") With a life like this, how is it that Nordan has never written a memoir before? The curious recurrence of midgets alone would have been too much temptation for many a lesser talent.

One of the book's most acute pleasures is Nordan's account of his childhood in the wonderfully named Itta Bena, Mississippi. (The Chickasaw words--reputed by local legend to mean "Home in the Woods"--actually mean "to build a house of crossed logs.") Growing up in Itta Bena, of course, is all about getting out of Itta Bena, but once Nordan does, things go downhill fast. In the typically sordid progression of alcohol and infidelity that follows, we miss, as readers, Itta Bena's certainties: they are comfortable, especially to rebel against, and Nordan's account of them is like a well-crafted coming-of-age novel. In contrast, the myriad ambiguities of grown-up life seem less grand, even less true, than fiction. Still, who else has ever attained understanding by confronting his "inner midget"? The general outlines of Nordan's ascent from hell may be familiar--the church basements, what he calls his "Don't Drink meetings"--but the particulars never are (cf. the chapter titled "The Amazing Technicolor Effing Machine"). Nordan is an original, a storyteller of great and unusual gifts, and in Boy with Loaded Gun, readers reap the fruits of both his present happiness and his past unhappiness. --Mary Park

Book Description

Lewis Nordan is famous for his special vision of the Mississippi Delta. His characters, for whom the closest-though hopelessly inadequate-description might be "eccentrics," share the stage with swamp elves and midgets living in the backyard. His fiction is unlike anybody else's and is as dark, hilarious, and affecting as any ever written.

It's also writing that lays bare the agony of adolescence and plows, as the Cleveland Plain Dealer once put it, "the fields of puzzling wonder that precede the responsibilities and disappointments of adulthood."

What bred and fed Nordan's imagination, his originality, his indefatigable sense of humor? The answers aren't obvious. But now that Lewis Nordan produces, directs, and stars in his own story, we just might find out.

Nordan's mother was widowed when he was a baby, and she went back to her home town to remarry and raise her only son "Buddy." Itta Bena, Mississippi, was a prototypical fifties Delta town, so drowsy that even before puberty, Nordan had made his escape plans. What happened next was pretty typical-a stint in the Navy, college in Mississippi, very early marriage, young fatherhood, alcoholism, infidelities, broken hearts. But in Nordan's hands, the typical turns into the transcendent and, at the heart of things, there is always the irrepressible laughter.

Horrible things and horribly funny things happen in Boy with Loaded Gun, but it's that heart that leads us through Lewis Nordan's dark tunnel and back into the light.

Customer Reviews:

Some things don't need telling.......2005-03-01

Lewis Nordan is undoubtedly an excellent writer. He has also had an "interesting" if somewhat dysfunctional life. He shares with the reader selected
parts fo that interesting life. Several tales are indeed memorable. However, he doesn't seem to have an appreciation of when things might best remain untold. In reading the book and its at times startling admissions, I was at times repulsed. The good parts way outweigh the bad. So, I'd recommend it, especialy for Nordan's fans, but be prepared to be shocked.

Nordan's double helping of alcoholism, fantasy, and loss.......2003-05-26

Lewis "Buddy" Nordan writes a memoir -- sort of.

Often times his memoir reads like a tell-all tale, and at other times like a novel about Nordan himself. The line between fact and fiction is rather hard to ascertain. Boy with Loaded Gun is difficult to pigeonhole into any traditional classification. However, fans will be pleased and new readers will be amazed with his eighth book.

Nordan confesses to cooking up conversations, changing names, and exaggerating. What's left is an immanently readable, laugh your head right off, story about growing up in the Mississippi Delta town of Itta Bena and the haywire adulthood Nordan lived upon leaving Mississippi in the 1940s and 50s.

For Nordan aficionados, the book touches on the perennial themes of his fiction. Beginning with his first collection of short stories published by LSU Press in 1983 Welcome to the Arrow-Catcher Fair, to his most recent novel Lighting Song, loneliness and grief take center stage, along with a double helping of alcoholism, fantasy, and a Gothic sense of doom and loss.

What makes Nordan's writing engaging is a sense of redemption. His characters are on a quest somewhat like the wayfarers Louisiana novelist Walker Percy wrote about. For Nordan, humor makes suffering and pain bearable.

The memoir begins with the early death of his father when Nordan was a baby. Soon his mother would remarry, this time to a drunk. Nordan's stepfather came home each day from work to retire to his bedroom, where he would drink beer until sleep. Each morning he'd awake to ritual puking. Unfortunately, Nordan followed in his stepfather's footsteps.

He was a bizarre teen, one often obsessed with sex and other fantasies. As a teenager, Nordan ordered a military surplus pistol from the back pages of a magazine and attempted to bushwhack his stepfather in cold blood. The gun mysteriously jammed; thus saving the boy from murder and providing a title for the book.

After a stint in the Navy, Nordan attended the Methodist Millsaps College in Jackson, where he found easy sex in the parking lot outside the women's dormitory. He and his partner quickly and ludicrously eloped. In graduate school, he bummed around with hippies, did drugs, lived on a farm, and had illicit trysts with the first real hippie he met. This was a life far removed from the confines of Itta Bena, though his departure wasn't far from the rural South. Dissipation, it seems, can be found in the remotest hamlets of the Bible Belt, even around Auburn, Alabama, where he studied for the Ph.D. in English.

The memoir has all the components of a good southern novel. It's sprinkled with drunkards, midgets, racial angst over the Emmett Till lynching, pathological liars, sexual perversion, and even an unclaimed corpse that is kept on display for several decades at a Mississippi funeral home.

In one of the book's saddest moments, Nordan's college-aged son committed suicide. Years earlier, a child by his first wife died at birth. Perhaps the suicide served as a catalyst for the author to finally grow up. It appears that Nordan eventually learned to take responsibility and to call his grief by name.

The story ends with a surreal book tour stop in New Orleans, the land of dreamy dreams. By then Nordan was a published author and teacher of creative writing at the University of Pittsburgh, remarried and reconciled with wife number two, and on the wagon.

Readers may learn more than they wish about the real Buddy Nordan.

No, readers will love this book, and not just long-time Nordan fans. They won't love it because of his now public failures, but because he's got the guts to tell the tale, and because of the life-affirming laughter in every page. As always, Nordan writes beautifully, even if he had to jumble up the facts to avoid being sued.

-------------Reviewed by Dayne Sherman

good...not great.......2002-10-25

This was the first I had read of Lewis Nordan, and I wasn't overly impressed.

I whipped through the first section about his (or should I say "Buddy's") childhood. After that, the book slows down. It becomes increasingly difficult to identify or sympathize with the problems and eccentricities of this young man as he comes of age. Buddy consistently fails to learn from his mistakes and the lack of growth is frustrating as a reader.

Still, I'll probably pick up another Nordan book to see if I like it any better.

fine work from a fine writer.......2002-05-24

In a world where everyone who ever endured a three-day suspension from middle school writes a histrionic tell-all memoir, it's a deep pleasure to read a memoir that fills what ought to be the requirements for any: 1. the experiences described are truly memorable; and 2. the book is written by a gifted writer who obviously does his work.

I say from now on unless both requirements are met, don't read the memoir.

Read this one.

Tremendous Style But Little Substance.......2002-04-30

Lewis Nordan is superior prose stylist, and his memoir BOY WITH LOADED GUN--which he describes in the preface as a mingling of fact and fancy--presents the reader with a series of scenes from a life that both collapses and then reconstructs through a combination of personal compulsion and unexpectedly sharp (and often humorous) encounters with life and death.

An extremely episodic work, BOY WITH LOADED GUN is divided into three portions, the first detailing Nordan's childhood in Itta Bena, Mississippi; the second his youth, first marriage, and rising alcoholism; and the third his painful recovery--complete with set-backs--from a life-time of self-destructive compulsion. The most successful of these portions is the first. Nordan effortlessly captures the eccentricties of growing up in post-war in prose that bespeaks the South in every aspect, and if BOY WITH LOADED GUN consisted of this portion only it would still find a special niche among the best of Southern belles lettres.

But life does not end with childhood, and the remainder of the book follows Nordon's life as it first unravels and then as he attempts (with many a set back) to knit it up again. Just as Nordan was unable to organize these portions of his life in the living, so is he unable to organize them on the page, and although the work remains stylistically flawless it becomes so extremely episodic that it lacks focus. After making such a long and frequently painful journey through Nordan's life, I expected him to offer a cummulative statement that would bring the diverse elements of his memoir into focus as the book neared its conclusion. But there is none--and this undercuts any sense of purpose the book might have. It is beautifully written, but there seems little point to it beyond writing beautifully.

Several [people] have suggested that Nordan is the "next William Faulkner." I can only assume these [people] have never read William Faulkner, for neither Nordan's style nor his material is remotely like anything Faulkner ever wrote. In tone of voice, however, Nordan does recall such authors as Eudora Welty and Harper Lee--particularly when writing of his childhood.

BOY WITH LOADED GUN, A MEMOIR.
Average customer rating:
BOY WITH LOADED GUN, A MEMOIR.
Lewis. Nordan
Manufacturer: Algonquin Books,
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover
ASIN: B000N7781Y

Book Description

In Nebraska, football is a religion and Tom Osborne is its patron saint. As head coach of the University of Nebraska Cornhuskers for 25 years, Osborne took his team to a bowl game every year, won three national championships in the last four years he coached, and ended his career boasting an 84 percent winning record. Now Osborne lets us in on the values it takes to achieve victory, on any field.

Both a memoir and a motivational guide, Faith in the Game discusses all the traits required for successful life management and teamwork--loyalty, perseverance, honesty, integrity, strategy, character, faith, and old-fashioned "sweat equity"--while tackling subjects such as his controversial 1995 season and his team's phenomenally successful Unity Council approach, in which representatives from each part of the team form problem-solving units. Conveyed in his own captivating, trademark tone, Osborne's messages will be cheered by readers from all walks of life. In the spirit of bestsellers by coaches Rick Pitino, Pat Riley, Lou Holtz, and Pat Summitt, Faith in the Game is destined to score high.

Customer Reviews:

Ok read.......2007-01-04

Faith in the Game by Tom Osborne covers the coaching career of Tom Osborne. He does this with the perspective of a Christian, which I enjoyed. But, I found that the middle of the book became somewhat dry and repetitive when discussing the legal troubles of the players. But I thought the overall message of the book was good. In comparison to other books about coaching and mentoring such as "Season of Life" I found Faith in the Game to be average.

Outstanding book on goal setting and acheivement!.......2003-10-10

I bought this book because I wanted to find out more about how Dr. Osborne managed to win 3 National Championships in a four year period.

What surprised me was the incredible business value of the book, especially chapter 5 on Goal Setting. His process for setting and acheiving goals is simple, easy to implement and it works!
I keep buying it and sending it to managers and business executives I work with, it is a great foundation for anyone serious about growing their ability to be more productive and to acheive more.

Great book!

Old Values and Chronic Success.......2003-08-10

Tom Osborne is one of the most successful college football coaches in history. His book is a wonderful treatise on how coaches and people can improve their lives and chances of success by simply preaching and practicing the basic values of our society. This book is a breath of fresh air in an increasingly fragmented and confused society.

It is noteworthy that Tom Osborne's success is particularly remarkable because he never had the advantages of recruiting from a deep talent pool in Nebraska, and many of his players came from high school programs where 8 man football was common. Osborne overcame these obstacles with basic hard work, religious faith, and teamwork.

This is a great book for any coach, manager, or parent. Highly recommmended. The only reason I didn't give 5 stars is because the book is relatively short, and I would've loved to read on for several more chapters.

Okay, so the style isn't Nabokov. But it's sound stuff........2002-12-05

The premise of Faith In the Game is simple: It's a conservative primer for life.

Now, whether you agree with everything within or not is your call, but Osborne successfully states his cases while interweaving stories of his own football team over the years. His transition from society to football is pretty effortless, quite frankly, and the book serves as a nice, non-confrontational entry into conservative living and philosophy. For all those people out there who are fed up with the liberal world -- and I am not one of them, mind you -- I'd suggest this book a thousand times over before I'd let them within 20 miles of Ann Coulter's rants.

Unlike Coulter and other conservative zealots, Osborne starts at the ground level of living -- for the coach, it's character -- and builds from there. In other words, the book is more a plan than an argument. And plans are generally quite a bit more persuasive.

Osborne always worked in the here and now, so this is not much of a grand memoir. He's still into trying to turn it all around. Frankly, I think some of these societal problems are beyond his grasp -- Osborne is too kind and sympathetic to consider our society as anything more than a collection of misguided folks, it seems -- but you won't find a lot of sports coaches who have actually considered these issues the way Osborne has.

Faith in the Game is the work of a thoughtful man.

Good, solid story of how Nebraska does it right.......2001-10-10

This is a neat book. It is fascinating, it has scores of information about how the Huskers built their program, and it is written in exactly the right amount of detail, including the technical details.

If you are a coach in any sport, if you are a Husker fan, or if you are a Tom Osborne fan, this book is a good read. It is also an excellent gift. It is one of the five best sports books I have read in the last few years. You can't miss with Faith in the Game.

GREAT HOLLYWOOD WESTERNS: Classic Pictures, Must-See Movies and 'B' Films
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GREAT HOLLYWOOD WESTERNS

GREAT HOLLYWOOD WESTERNS: Classic Pictures, Must-See Movies and 'B' Films
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Mel Bay Fun With the Tenor Banjo Book/CD Set
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Mel Bay Fun With the Tenor Banjo Book/CD Set
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Not a bad book, but not great either........2002-01-28

This is the book I bought when I wanted to learn to play the tenor banjo. I got it mainly because it was the cheapest book they had. Not my smartest move. In its defense, the book is not bad: there is a nice section in the back with chord diagrams, and the songs are for the most part old familiar tunes, so you'll know if you're playing them right, and it does give you a good introduction to the instrument. The problem is that the book is pretty thin, everything is in notation...no tablature (not that you'll need it, but still), and it doesn't really show you any advanced techniques, which I found in other books. I outgrew this book VERY quickly, after a week and a half, I was playing everything in the book and ready for more...but it wasn't there. If you have previous music experience (and who takes up tenor banjo as a first instrument?) You won't get too much out of the book. Go for something else with more substance.

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Mel Bay Fun with the tenor banjo
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Mel Bay
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Stan Newman's series of original, themed crosswords heads in a new direction this season with Stanley Newman's American Originals Crosswords—50 brand-new puzzles about 50 well-known people who are both unique and uniquely American. The subjects include notable figures from four centuries, who made their marks in a wide variety of areas. Highlights include:
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