If These Walls Had Ears: The Biography of a House

In 1989, Morgan, a freelance writer who collaborated with President Clinton's mother, Virginia Kelley, on her autobiography, Leading with My Heart, moved with his family into a low-slung Craftsman-style bungalow at 501 Holly in Little Rock, Ark. Intrigued by the eight families who had occupied the house since it was built in 1890, the author researched their lives and interviewed their survivors and here presents engaging vignettes of each occupant. After building it as a sturdy, spacious and somewhat luxurious dwelling for themselves, Charles and Jessie Armour had to begin taking in boarders after Charles's business failed. After several other families lived there, the house began to deteriorate, and Morgan describes the loving restoration by Forrest and Sue Wolfe, the residents from 1976 to 1980. The book is most interesting for its chatty detail about previous occupants, but the author's sidetrips into his own past blur the focus. (Aug.)