Pioneer Press Review
On Sunday, the Pioneer Press (Twin Cities) published a nice review of "Raised by Wolves." To say I'm honored would be an understatement. It's included below:
AND NOW FOR SOMETHING COMPLETELY DIFFERENT …
You have to love a guy who considers “On the Origin of Species” a parenting guide and recalls when he worked at a zoo and had to hold a wet cloth on the genitals of an elderly horse. A guy who writes, “When your wife is very pregnant, comparing her to a cow won’t make her feel any better. At least, that’s what the doctor told me.” (He grew up on a farm.)
170319bks_geigerCounterMatt Geiger, Massachusetts transplant to Wisconsin, offers in “The Geiger Counter: Raised by Wolves and Other Stories,” musings and adventures that will make you laugh and maybe nod in agreement when he occasionally gets serious. Geiger won four Wisconsin Newspaper Association awards for these stories, which are really essays but, he says, “essay” is a boring word.
The best way to read this book is to just let go and follow Geiger wherever his fancy takes him. Some of his stories are about his boyhood, including the time he tried to buy a monkey from a dealer in Florida, mailed to his home in Ipswitch, Mass.
Admitting he has “the zealous pride of a convert,” he muses that the best thing about Wisconsin is the Cow Chip Toss. “To be more specific,” he writes, “the best thing about Wisconsin is the fact that no one seems to think the Cow Chip Toss is weird.” After explaining the toss (no need to go into detail for Minnesota readers), he worries that newcomers are going to change this kind of rural tradition, making Wisconsin “more urbane and more like everyplace else.”
A star of the book is Geiger’s daughter Hadley, now a toddler. He’s hilarious when he recalls how he worried that his baby’s head was shrinking until he learned the original measurement wasn’t accurate. He writes of the wonder of watching her open to the world and worries about how to teach her language. When he realized he might not be here for her someday, he set up a shelf marked “Books for Hadley to Read” that includes Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Cormac McCarthy, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Ernest Hemingway, Karl Ove Knausgaard and Lao Tzu “to fill her head with beautiful, complicated, contradictory ideas.”
A really good dad.
AND NOW FOR SOMETHING COMPLETELY DIFFERENT …
You have to love a guy who considers “On the Origin of Species” a parenting guide and recalls when he worked at a zoo and had to hold a wet cloth on the genitals of an elderly horse. A guy who writes, “When your wife is very pregnant, comparing her to a cow won’t make her feel any better. At least, that’s what the doctor told me.” (He grew up on a farm.)
170319bks_geigerCounterMatt Geiger, Massachusetts transplant to Wisconsin, offers in “The Geiger Counter: Raised by Wolves and Other Stories,” musings and adventures that will make you laugh and maybe nod in agreement when he occasionally gets serious. Geiger won four Wisconsin Newspaper Association awards for these stories, which are really essays but, he says, “essay” is a boring word.
The best way to read this book is to just let go and follow Geiger wherever his fancy takes him. Some of his stories are about his boyhood, including the time he tried to buy a monkey from a dealer in Florida, mailed to his home in Ipswitch, Mass.
Admitting he has “the zealous pride of a convert,” he muses that the best thing about Wisconsin is the Cow Chip Toss. “To be more specific,” he writes, “the best thing about Wisconsin is the fact that no one seems to think the Cow Chip Toss is weird.” After explaining the toss (no need to go into detail for Minnesota readers), he worries that newcomers are going to change this kind of rural tradition, making Wisconsin “more urbane and more like everyplace else.”
A star of the book is Geiger’s daughter Hadley, now a toddler. He’s hilarious when he recalls how he worried that his baby’s head was shrinking until he learned the original measurement wasn’t accurate. He writes of the wonder of watching her open to the world and worries about how to teach her language. When he realized he might not be here for her someday, he set up a shelf marked “Books for Hadley to Read” that includes Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Cormac McCarthy, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Ernest Hemingway, Karl Ove Knausgaard and Lao Tzu “to fill her head with beautiful, complicated, contradictory ideas.”
A really good dad.
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