Apr 8 2009
The Last Street Before Cleveland by Joe Mackall
For some reason if a book doesn’t get reviewed relatively quickly I struggle mightily to get around to it at all. This habit vexes me to no end and this year I have tried, with varying degrees of success, to be better about not allowing books to get lost.
Joe Mackall’s [amazon-product region="us" text="The Last Street Before Cleveland" type="text"]0803232551[/amazon-product] was one book that got lost in the shuffle somehow and sat in the “To Be Reviewed” pile for months. So this week I resolved to write about it and check that off the list.
So what exactly is the book about? Despite the books brevity (150 pages) it is not easy to summarize. It is about trying to go home again; about overcoming depression and finding faith; about memory and nostalgia; about the dying blue collar world; etc.
The publisher describes it this way:
The old neighborhood was the place Joe Mackall left. It was a place where everyone’s parents worked at the factory at the dead end of the street, where the Catholic church and school operated like a religious city hall, and where a boy like Joe grew up vowing to get out as soon as he could and to shed his blue-collar beginnings and failed, flawed religion. When the mysterious death of a childhood friend draws him back to the last street before Cleveland, however, he discovers that there is more to “old haunts†than mere words—and more to severing one’s roots than just getting away.
The titular “last street before” Cleveland is the street Mackall lived on in Parma, Ohio just outside of Cleveland; one street up and you were in Cleveland proper. Which is not all that far away from where the author lives now in Ashland, Ohio where he teaches English and journalism at Ashland University. But culturally and metaphorically it is a different world.
So when he returns to the geography of his youth it is a disorientating experience and it takes him in directions he never anticipated. This memoir takes the reader along for the ride.
For my belated thoughts click below.
