About Them

by Chester Aaron

"Chester Aaron's novel-in-stories, About Us, published nearly 35 years ago, holds a unique and lasting place in the artistic annals of American boyhood. Through the account of young Benny Kahn we come to inhabit the Pennsylvania mining town of Sundown in the years leading up to World War II. Colorful and clear-eyed, unsentimental but full of feeling, the book gives us a rich and textured sense of life as it was lived there and then. Now, in About Them, an octogenarian Benny revisits what remains of that largely vanished world--to show what time and memory have done to the characters and the place, to fill in suppressed pieces of the past, and to irradiate the whole with a sense not only of what was and is, but what should be. The narrative, by turns dramatic, comic, and chilling like its predecessor, is nonetheless permeated with kindness, generosity, and love right up to the astonishing ending. How Aaron manages this without a trace of mawkishness is not the least of the truly rare delights this book offers"--Donald Fanger.

176 pages, Paperback

First published March 7, 2011

About the author

Chester Aaron was a prolific American author for both children and adults, and wrote novels, stories, and memoirs. Born in 1923 in the coal-mining town of Butler, Pennsylvania, he was educated at Butler Senior High School, UCLA, UC Berkeley, and San Francisco State University. He saw combat in World War II, and was with the troops that liberated Dachau. Following publication of his first novel in 1967, he was an x-ray technician at Alta Bates Hospital in Berkeley, CA. He joined the faculty at Saint Mary’s College, retiring as a full professor in 1997. For twenty-five years he cultivated ninety varieties of exotic garlic on his farm in Sonoma County, becoming a world-renowned expert, and publishing a number of books on the subject. He died in 2019.