Edition |
1st ed. |
Description |
vii, 310 p. : ill. ; 20 cm. |
Summary |
"What can we learn about life, love, and artillery from an eighty-two-year-old man whose favorite hobby is firing his homemade cannons? Visit by visit--often with his young daughters in tow--author Michael Perry is about to find out. Toiling in a shop Perry describes as "an antique store stocked by Rube Goldberg, curated by Hunter Thompson, and rearranged by a small earthquake," Tom Hartwig makes gag shovel handles, parts for quarter-million-dollar farm equipment, and--now and then--batches of potentially "extralegal" explosives. As he approaches his sixtieth wedding anniversary with his wife, Arlene, Tom, famous for driving a team of oxen in local parades, has an endless reservoir of stories dating back to days of his prize Model A, and an anti-authoritarian streak refreshed daily by the four-lane interstate that was shoved through his front yard in 1965 and now dumps over 8 million vehicles past his kitchen window every year. And yet Visiting Tom is dominated by the elderly man's equanimity and ultimately--when he and Perry converse over the kitchen table as husbands and as the fathers of daughters--unvarnished tenderness."--From publisher description. |
Source |
NBK 9/12 PPL |
Subject |
Hartwig, Tom.
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Perry, Michael, 1964-
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Perry, Michael, 1964- -- Friends and associates.
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Farm life -- Wisconsin.
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Farmers -- Wisconsin -- Biography.
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Rural families -- Wisconsin.
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Wisconsin -- Biography.
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Added Title |
Man, a highway, and the road to roughneck grace |
ISBN |
9780061894442 |
|
0061894443 |
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