Affection and Estrangement: A Southern Family Memoir

by Preston M. Browning Jr.

Book Overview

Focusing on race, religion, and class, author Preston M. Browning Jr. discusses life in the rural South as he experienced it in the 1930s and 1940s. With humorous touches and an eye for detail, this... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1440171297
• ISBN13: 9781440171291
• Release Date: October 2009
• Publisher: iUniverse
• Length: 280 Pages
• Weight: 0.90 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.6" x 6.0" x 9.0"

Customer Reviews

A beautiful meditation on place, race, and the making of a self

This memoir is much more than a collection of family anecdotes; it is a smart, nuanced rumination on coming of age in a divided America. Preston Browning, Jr. has a superb eye for detail: his sketches of people and landscapes build a gorgeously vivid--and complex--portrait of the South in the 1930s and 40s. An extraordinary book.

Engaging and informative

Affection and Estrangement is a thoughtful and astute memoir and family history of a southern lad, Preston Browning--who would eventually teach English at a prominent northern university. During his coming of age, he tries to make sense of the paradoxes and mysteries of the race relations, class distinctions and religious differences he experienced in the 1930s and 1940s. As interesting and entertaining as the personal anecdotes of the youthful-minded Browning are, I was particularly engaged by his portraits of family members, which along with his matured wisdom and scholarly observations, gave this Brooklyn boy a better understanding of particular aspects of the way Southerners think. As a result, I'm sure my next encounters with the characters who inhabit the works of Tennessee Williams, Flannery O'Conner and William Faulkner will be more thoroughly appreciated.