"These are the reflections of an elderly man as he looks back at his four years in high school. It is a personal story about an uprooted Chicago boy transplanted to the small, culturally and religiously isolated town of 'New Kassel' in northeastern Wisconsin. The story centers on the distorted role of athletics in the minds of young men in small-town America in the 1950s, and on their gender and race unconsciousness... However, the story is primarily about the ongoing philosophical search for family love, and the inner arguments about the human desire to connect to something, even to the land. It reveals the blind faith of the family farmer of the 1950s, with no lifeline to the government or to a corporation. Above all, this is an investigation of the ethical and physical lessons that an elderly person can learn by paying attention to his childhood. It is an inquiry into the values and tensions that we have confronted and incorporated into the creation of our character... "--Page 1.