cover image Mid-Lands: A Family Album

Mid-Lands: A Family Album

Robert Murray Davis. University of Georgia Press, $24.95 (224pp) ISBN 978-0-8203-1392-4

What a surprise to recapture your past in Booneville, Mo., although you haven't grown up there. That's what happens while reading Davis's memoir of mid-century childhood in middle America. The author, professor of English at the University of Oklahoma, combines the approach of an anthropologist with the viewpoint of a Midwestern youth as he recreates his hometown in the '40s and '50s and invites you to recall things trivial and profound: Wonder Woman's cleavage, countless cans of Crisco at the A & P, the relative merits of cowboys Roy Rogers and Gene Autry, the sense ``that the present was a very good place to be.'' This is a family album all can feel cozily nostalgic about. Photos not seen by PW . (Feb.)