A Hole in the World: An American Boyhood

New York: Simon & Schuster, 1990. First Printing . Hard Back. Very Good/Very Good. 6" x 9 1/2. 271 Pages. White boards with blue quarter spine and gold lettering and blue endpapers. From the back cover. When I was thirteen months old, my mother killed herself. So I eventually learned, as I learned her maiden name, where she was born, and how old she was when she ended her life, twenty-nine. (And good lord, writing these words now, all these years afterward, for the first time in memory my eyes have filled with tears of mourning for her. What impenetrable vessel preserve them?) I didn't know my mother, except as infants know. At the beginning of my life the world acquired a hole. That's what I knew, that there was a hole in the world. For me there still is. It's singularity. In and out of a hole like that, anything goes. Since I started childhood as a half-orphan, and along lthe way endured a wicked stepmother, huckleberry wanderings, years of orphanage life and preparations for a trip to Mars, I want to emphasize here, at the outset, that I understand that the world is full of terrible sufferieng, compared to which the small inconveniences of my childhood are as a drop of rain in the sea. My older brother Stan, suffered more, protecting me. I reconstructed my childhood because that't the spring that seems to be flowing at the moment, something else gushing from the hole, which in of of its manifestations is a fountain. This is the author's tenth book one of which was the Pulitzer Prize-Winning The Making of the Atomic Bomb. Richard Rhodes grew up in Kansas City and Independence Missouri and is a Yale graduate.