Guns and Boyhood in America: A Memoir of Growing Up in the 50s

Holden's contribution to the series Poets on Poetry is an examination of the aesthetics and culture of a childhood spent in the aftermath of WWII and the uneasy peace of the Cold War. In loosely linked essays, Holden probes a boyhood informed by a fascination with explosives, military might, baseball and sex and in doing so delves into the national fascination with these things. As the son of a well-known Bell Labs scientist, Holden spent his childhood in the shadow of imposing intellect and vanity. In the essay ""American Male Honor,"" he explores the male fascination with fighting and the honorable traditions of karate. ""Boyhood Aesthetics"" reveals the harsh beauty in the things that boys often find alluring, ""the devious, unlikely ways that a boy, growing up in America--a country in which military hardware is so much a part of the landscape that we no longer notice it--may have to take to satisfy the human hunger for beauty, scrounging for it in even the grimmest facts that we have come to live with, in the perfection of our weapons."" ""Peyton Place"" looks at the sexual and political repression of the '50s and McCarthyism. As Holden summarizes, ""The organic numbness of adolescence is the numbness of a lynch-mob. You don't know anything. You don't feel anything. You don't fear anything. You've been anaesthetized. But it was who we were then."" Guns and Violence is an keen study of the nature of American boyhood during this era, glossed by illuminating poetry. (June)