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- Kirkus Reviews "Often funny, sometimes heartbreaking, but always full of life, characters and the tangled web of small-town history, daily drama, and strain of occasional weirdness that make country living such a challenge and an adventure...A joy of a book." - Michael Korda, author of Country Matters "Quietly devastating...intimate and disarming and lovely." - Esquire
"I have been waiting for thirty years for a
fresh and talented voice to rise out of the volunteer fire service in
- Dennis Smith, author of Report From Ground Zero "In sublime prose Mr. Perry has written a uniquely
American book about life in a small town. Yet the themes of this terrific book are
large--love, death, pain, exultation and family. Mr. Perry is a writer who also
happens to be an EMT and a volunteer firefighter. The stories that he tells are
heartbreaking, funny, pure and mesmerizing. All of the Book Sense nominations are
written by booksellers who have read many a book, including myself. Every once in a
while a book comes along that knocks your socks off and this is the one! This
is just the beginning of a great writer's career."
- Leslie Graham, A Clean Well-Lighted Place for Books,
- Charlene Taylor, Reader’s Oasis, Tucson,
- Crispin Sartwell, columnist, “In the best bit of
writing I’ve read this year, Michael Perry tells the story of his small northwestern
- Marcia Rider,
Capitola Book Café, "It is a rare book indeed that can transport us completely into a place we've never been. Population: 485 is one of those rare and wonderful books. Michael Perry has brought to us a town rich with history and personality, and an overriding sense of home. In his quiet, personal story Perry recounts his family's lifes as volunteer firefighters. It would seem at first glance that this would result in a memoir of sorrow and pain, as the town's history unfolds from disaster to disaster, but instead it is a story of great humility, humor and humanity. There is pain, to be sure, and an ending as sad as any I've read, but like life I wouldn't have missed it for the world." - Russ Harvey, Codys Books, Berkeley, California “When writer Perry returned to his
tiny childhood town, New Auburn, Wisconsin, after 12 years away, he joined the
village’s volunteer fire and rescue department. Six
years later, he’d begun to understand at last that “to truly live in a place,
you must give your life to that place.” These
charming, discursive essays are loosely structured around the calls Perry responds to as a
volunteer EMT, including everything from a collision at the local Laundromat to heart
attacks, fires and suicides. Perry’s
mosaic of smalltown life also paints charming portraits of the town’s memorable
characters, such as the One-Eyed Beagle, another firefighter. Perry’s insights into the small-town mentality
come from apparent contemplation, and he writes about them with good humor, in prose
reminiscent of Rick Bragg’s: “The old man says he had a woozy spell, and so he
took some nitroglycerin pills. This is like
saying you had high blood pressure so you did your taxes.” In spite of an enormous surprise in the final
chapter, the book’s lack of central conflict leaves it feeling desultory, like a
collection of good magazine pieces rather than a propulsive chronicle of quirky
small-towners a la John Berendt’s Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil. Still, there are moments when Perry achieves an
unforced lyricism: “Rescue work is like jazz. Improvisation
based on fundamentals.” FORECAST: A
blurb from Michael Korda – himself a recent aficionado of small-town living –
and the current hoopla surrounding volunteer firemen and EMT workers will attract buyers
to Perry’s celebration of "...[Perry] cuts through bullshit like a buzz saw, and he's not gonna fret over the mess. Most surprising and wonderful is Perry's occasional sentimentality ... he's a master of tension and contradiction. When he's done herding the words around the page, what you have left is a finely crafted, hard-to-come-by honesty." - Hope Magazine - full text of Hope Magazine online review here. "...a moving, funny and often deeply insightful account of his experiences and of life in a small town...saviors and survivors live side-by-side, and Perry reveals how this can produce a profound comfort, especially in the book's devastating final chapter." - Road King Magazine "...delightfully lyrical...Perry has a way of making the work of emergency care—from the everyday to the intensely emotional—understandable and tangible for anyone. His way with words is enchanting, and often very funny. The piece about puke at the start of chapter four elicited a loud guffaw from me, in public...This book reminded me of Garrison Keillor’s “A Prairie Home Companion” monologues" - Merginet.com - full text here "...'It's fun to tell funny stories, and it's fun to tell a few stories about what it's like to fight a fire. But I feel really blessed to be able to write about just simple, beautiful things like smelt feeds,' [Perry] chuckles. Beautiful and smelt in the same sentence? Then he proceeds, 'I can joke and call it 'deep-fried bait,' but it's obvious that I show up every year and go back for several plates!'..." - Chetek Alert - full text here - Seattle Times - full review here - Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel - story here "When he went home to New Auburn, Wis., and joined the volunteer fire and rescue service, Michael Perry acquired a new angle on the basics of emergency medical treatment. Sure, some of his patients were strangers, scooped from wrecks out on the highway that had helped turn New Auburn into a town that, like the family farms around it, had been ''pretty much kicked in the head.'' But many others were people he knew, people whose friends and families he'd run into at the Gas-N-Go or the softball tournament. And one of them would come from his own extended family. His account of what he's learned from seven years of burning barns and midnight medevacs shows his obvious affection for a rural Midwestern world where ''visiting with'' someone means hours of shooting the breeze and a ''supper club'' is the height of sophistication. Perry confesses that his loyalties are divided between ''the Gun Rack Crowd and the Pale and Tortured Contingent'' -- yielding a narrative style that jolts between nicely downplayed redneck realism (''We went there because a woman thought she was having a heart attack. I believe what she was having was her 17th beer'') and sensitivo posturing (''We find a trail leading back over the landscape of time, and we find ourselves bearing forward the remnants of a distant aesthetic not immediately evident in our detritus, but ours to claim, nonetheless''). Out at the farther extremities, too much potted history and banal philosophizing weaken its pulse, but ''Population: 485'' has a storytelling heart that won't quit." - New York Times Sunday Book Review |
