The Life And Times Of The Last Kid Picked

Through the telling of his own madcap childhood, David Benjamin pays homage to the exuberance of young boys at play. Whether he's stalking frogs though the swamps of Tomah, Wisconsin, playing four-kid baseball with his bothersome little brother and two favourite cousins, or sneaking into the cinema to watch Saturday-afternoon Westerns, David Benjamin is the kind of kid who would have eagerly fallen in with Tom Sawyer. In relating his adventures - including one truly sorry incident with Snappy, the snapping turtle, and a run-in with a particularly fiendish squirrel - David Benjamin is by turns hysterically funny, movingly sincere, caustic, aggrieved and intrepid. Traversing the nooks and crannies of kidhood from playing fields to swimming holes, The Life and Times of the Last Kid Picked captures a time and a place in twentieth-century life and magically recalls the myriad scrapes and adventures and wanderlust that once made childhood such an exhilarating enterprise.

Préface
A rousing celebration of the lost art of childhood, this is a hilarious and charming evocation of growing up in Middle America in the 1950s.

Auteur

David Benjamin was born in Sparta, Wisconsin, in 1949 and lived in nearby Tomah until he was thirteen. He began his first novel, The Adventures of Stanley and Peggy, the Sniderman Twins, in the fourth grade. It remains unfinished. A contributor to the Chicago Tribune, The Philadelphia Inquirer, the San Francisco Chronicle and the Wisconsin State Journal, Benjamin now lives with his wife in Paris.