Visiting Tom

May 28, 2012
Tom is 82-year-old Tom Hartwig, who lives in a classic twin-porched Wisconsin clapboard farmhouse down the road from Perry, his wife and daughters. As Perry puts it, “We live on a farm, but I am not a farmer.” Instead, he plays music with his band, delivers lectures, and from his office over the garage he turns out magazine articles and books. He first wrote about his Wisconsin neighbors in Population: 485 and traveled back roads in Truck before covering rural rituals in Coop. In this outing, the rustic images of Wisconsin photographers John Shimon and Julie Lindemann serve as chapter intros and fuse with the text. A photo of a dust-covered cannon in Hartwig’s cluttered workshop leads into Tom’s account of making the cannon. Every object has a story, from lathe to sawmill: “This is the most complicated thing I ever built, he says, hands on his hips as he stares at the sawmill.... There’s over a hunnerd pounds’ a welding rods in that thing.” Perry hopes his daughters will see the historical implications and “all the wisdom and history” in Tom’s stories. Blending his own autobiography into Tom’s profile, Perry plunges into the soul of the American heartland. While Foxfire fans will relish the emphasis on forgotten crafts and tools, others will appreciate Perry’s gift as a bucolic wordsmith, etching a sensitive portrait of vanishing country life where “the light of a firefly is the size of a teardrop.”

September 15, 2012
Though Perry makes no claim to being an actual farmer whose livelihood is dependent on his labor, he offers a loving portrait of the occasional rigors and quirks of farm life. In this book, the focus is on his neighbor Tom Hartwig, a man who has lived 82 years in one farmhouse in rural Wisconsin, on a farm that survived the construction of a four-lane interstate in its front yard in 1965. Tom, known for his hobby of building and occasionally firing cannons, offers pearls of wisdom on everything from living with whizzing traffic outside your kitchen window, to repairing tools ranging from massive farm equipment to shovel handles, to raising daughters. Perry relates his own farm life, including realizing that taking his daughter to swim in the local creek is more important than deadlines and appreciating the pleasure of odd tools as he sharpens a scythe (only to be told very matter-of-factly by Tom that a gas-powered weed whacker is better). A charming and humorous appreciation of life by a middle-aged man late to farming and parenting.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2012, American Library Association.)

August 1, 2012
The warmhearted account of a middle-aged man's friendship with an eccentric octogenarian neighbor. When Men's Health contributing editor Perry (Coop: A Year of Poultry, Pigs, and Parenting, 2009, etc.) met Tom Hartwig, he had no idea that this man with the "brushy shock of hair, the fatless cheeks, the deep-seamed skin and the nose like a flint broadhead" would one day become an important part of his life. A farmer who loved tinkering in a home workshop that looked like it was "stocked by Rube Goldberg, curated by Hunter Thompson, and rearranged by a small earthquake," Tom had a special fondness for assembling, and firing, vintage Civil War canons. Perry did not consciously go to Tom "seeking" anything beyond repairs for small pieces of equipment or the occasional get-together, yet he still found himself quietly inspired by Tom's feistiness and wisdom. The older man's unwillingness to surrender his dignity in the face of an interstate construction project that cut through his farm gave Perry the courage to fight a county-highway-commission project to reconfigure an intersection near his own house. The almost-60-year relationship Tom had with his wife, Arlene, offered a model of enduring domestic success that Perry also admired. Musing on his own comparatively brief marriage, the author observes somewhat wryly, "[f]amiliarity is no excuse for lowering your standards." But perhaps most importantly of all, the couple provided both Perry and his family a link to the past and a feeling of generational continuity rare in an otherwise disconnected modern age. Perry's portrayal of Tom and his life are both engaging, although the meandering nature of the narrative can be frustrating. Nevertheless, the moments of genuine emotion make up for its slow pace. Flawed, but down-to-earth and genuine.

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April 1, 2012

Award-winning author Perry, an NPR contributor, recently returned home to a 37-acre farm in New Auburn, WI (see his Population: 485). There, he's neighbors with octogenarian Tom Hartwig, who runs a shop seemingly "stocked by Rube Goldberg" and defies the four-lane interstate that was shoved through his front yard a few decades back. A portrait of an individual and a place; look for a big driving tour in the heartland.

Copyright 2012 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.