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A Memoir from Anywhere but Here
by Angela Palm
Book Reviewed by:A spellbinding memoir of place, young love, and a life-altering crime.
Angela Palm grew up in a place not marked on the map, her house set on the banks of a river that had been straightened to make way for farmland. Every year, the Kankakee River in rural Indiana flooded and returned to its old course while the residents sandbagged their homes against the rising water. From her bedroom window, Palm watched the neighbor boy and loved him in secret, imagining a life with him even as she longed for a future that held more than a job at the neighborhood bar. For Palm, caught in this landscape of flood and drought, escape was a continually receding hope.
Though she did escape, as an adult Palm finds herself drawn back, like the river, to her origins. But this means more than just recalling vibrant, complicated memories of the place that shaped her, or trying to understand the family that raised her. It means visiting the prison where the boy that she loved is serving a life sentence for a brutal murder. It means trying to chart, through the mesmerizing, interconnected essays of Riverine, what happens when a single event forces the path of her life off course.
These evocative meditations on "place as lifeline" and personality as mutable will urge you to reconsider your own path – what has brought you to where you are now and what has remained the same during the drifting, unexpected course of a life...continued
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(Reviewed by Rebecca Foster).
In the second half of her memoir, Riverine, Angela Palm uses terms she learned from her college criminal justice classes as headings to organize the material. Here's a closer look at a few:
The Broken Windows Theory
In 1982, social scientists James Q. Wilson and George Kelling proposed the broken windows theory to explain why particular neighborhoods become prone to crime. Essentially they viewed criminality as an incremental progression, starting with misdemeanors and moving up to serious infractions; thus, rather than focusing on major crimes, they started small. Living in an unsafe community where disorder reigns – where broken windows remain unrepaired and so it feels like the local government and the police do not care ...
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