Overview
The title of the book, Davis explains, is a description, not a value judgment. Compared to a middle-class education, which is "supposed to help you maintain status so that you can understand what your family is saying," a lower-middle-class education is "supposed to improve your status so that your family will not understand what you are saying." When Davis left his hometown in rural Missouri and arrived in Kansas City to attend Rockhurst College, he had yet to see television or the New York Times or a foreign film. The college aimed to mold such impressionable young men into upstanding Catholic laymen, but Davis's increasing interests in girls, jazz, and writing took him down a path less traditional than the one the college had in mind. Davis's account show the real 1950s. Though now hailed as the era of staunch family values, this was a time when such values were starting to be challenged, when an increasing number of people sought alternative ways of seeing and experiencing the world. Called the Silent Generation because they did not openly rebel, many of these young people did not easily accept the values their parents and teachers espoused. The lessons Davis learns during his college years extend beyond those provided in the classroom. With increasing experience, he realizes what he cannot do or be: he cannot live at home again, and, despite a serious love interest, is not ready to marry or settle down. By the time of graduation he does know he wants to be a writer, but after a stint as a journalist for a small-town newspaper, he pursues a career as a professor, the role he finally knows will suit him best.Editorials
Publishers Weekly -
The University of Oklahoma English professor describes his boyhood and undergraduate education with irony and scholarly scrupulousness, but not in the revelatory and touching mode of this book's impressive 1992 companion volume, Mid-Lands: A Family Album. In his "A Postscript and a Preface," Davis writes: "Mid-Lands is about where some of us came from. This book is about how we started going somewhere else." "Somewhere else" is, unfortunately, no odyssey; it's only academia. Perhaps so as not to repeat the glories of the previous book, Davis skims over how his family, friends, town and hobbies affected his real education and instead focuses with wearying persistence on the minute particulars of the Missouri Catholic schools he danced through. Accounting for his schoolboy cynicism, he writes: "As far as I could tell, anything described as education consisted of embalmed facts, conventional pieties, and flowery language to cover stale emotions." Yet too many details here are expertly culled from the "embalmed facts"official records and publications of Davis's schools and Jesuit college (Rockhurst). In the best chapters, Davis efficiently outlines the popular culture of the 1950s he was discovering as a boy and young man. Photos. (Sept.)Booknews
A memoir of an English professor's student days at a small Catholic college in the early 1950s, combining a witty coming-of-age story with the story of a generation of students who were the first in their working-class families to go to college. No index. Annotation c. Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)Kirkus Reviews
Following up his narrative of his rural Missouri childhood in Mid-Lands (1992), Davis (English/Univ. of Oklahoma) modestly offers a memoir of his middle-of-the-road, middlebrow, 1950s Kansas City college career.If a middle-class education (i.e., Ivy League) is "supposed to help you maintain status so that your family can understand what you are saying," a lower-middle-class education is, according to Davis, "supposed to help you improve your status so that your family will not understand what you are saying." Many of Davis's generation were the first in their families to leave home to attend college, and although this was not quite the case with Davis, he did arrive at the Jesuit-run Rockhurst College as a slightly bookish farmboy with an unexpungeable accent. Revisiting his college records and papers, Davis is abashed to discover a recruiting letter that boasted of a student body of "average Joes scholastically" and a prospectus that rhetorically asked, "Does training by men and with men mean more to you?" Davis finds his youthful self equally obtuse, not to mention naive politically, romantically, and intellectually. An undistinguished face in his class picture, his student-self is portrayed, with some lenience and affection, as semiconscious of the Korean War, oblivious to the Eisenhower recession, emotionally untutored with his first sweetheart, and in general too busy with intramural sports, the college paper, and "barracks" life to acquire a genuine education. While Davis writes with rueful clarity about life in a small midwestern college in the 1950s, he frequently strikes chords that transcend time and place.
In contrast to recent let-it-all-hang-out autobiographies from academics, such as Frank Lentricchia's The Edge of Night (1994), Davis's personal memoir of the Silent Generation's college years stirs up nostalgia with low-key irony.