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Bingo Night at the Fire Hall: Rediscovering Life in an American Village
A humorous portrait of the author's life in the Virginia Blue Ridge Mountains details a small town where everyone gets along and her adventures there, which include finding shelter in a bar during a blizzard and writing obituaries for the local paper.
224 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 1997
3 people are currently reading
158 people want to read
About the author
Barbara Holland
56 books60 followersBarbara Murray Holland was an American author who wrote in defense of such modern-day vices as cursing, drinking, eating fatty food and smoking cigarettes, as well as a memoir of her time spent growing up in Chevy Chase, Maryland, near Washington, D.C.
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Displaying 1 - 23 of 23 reviews
February 23, 2008
Those of us who live in once completely rural areas, or even those who are confirmed city dwellers with a sense of the need for clear boundaries between rural and urban will find a lot to think about while reading this book. From the edges of her rural community, Holland watches the passage of a way of life as developers buy up local farms and transform them presto chango into "countryside estates," houses which look, as Holland notes, like they're "dropped from the sky." What I especially liked about this book was the way it chronicles on a very personal level the regrets the author feels as this process takes place. It's a sort of quiet requiem for a way of life she has never fully participated in, but admires. From where I sit, across the Potomac River, watching the suburbs creep into Montgomery County's "agricultural preserve", her musings are painfully familiar. But they aren't bleak, which is this book's saving grace. When I finished the book I had a clear, almost intimate feel for the author sitting in her little house on the mountainside, "still there."
March 2, 2017
Barbara Holland's evocative stories of her life in a rural setting brought back memories of my own childhood in the rolling farmland outside Syracuse, NY. My town wasn't quite as rustic and "pioneer-y" as the Blue Ridge mountains, but the essential things were the same. The close knit community where families stayed for generations, the friendly neighbors you knew by name and chatted with regularly, the working farms, the parades, the gatherings (always with homemade food), the general store and the bank and the post office.... I feel very lucky to have experienced all that.
Thank you, Barbara, for taking me back to where I came from and reminding me why it matters.
Thank you, Barbara, for taking me back to where I came from and reminding me why it matters.
February 22, 2015
Holland is a good writer and I grew up in a little town, which I still love from a distance, that reminds me somewhat of this community.
But Holland using their local jargon in her own conversations was a little hokey, and a community that has no knowledge of or interest in world affairs isn't cute or endearing. Yes, everyone is happy there, but does anyone care about global warming or Ebola or war? It seems not.
And the pride in the South and Confederacy while blacks and whites are buds? C'mon.
And her disgruntlement over making room for people who don't attend the First Baptist Church? Yikes!!
Really, you can love a place and a people but this was just too saccharine.
But Holland using their local jargon in her own conversations was a little hokey, and a community that has no knowledge of or interest in world affairs isn't cute or endearing. Yes, everyone is happy there, but does anyone care about global warming or Ebola or war? It seems not.
And the pride in the South and Confederacy while blacks and whites are buds? C'mon.
And her disgruntlement over making room for people who don't attend the First Baptist Church? Yikes!!
Really, you can love a place and a people but this was just too saccharine.
February 19, 2019
What a delightful story about Holland inheriting her mother's summer home in the Blue Ridge mountains of Virginia and deciding to live there. Her description of the people, land and animals is vivid and I can see myself sitting on the porch and looking down on the valley. She tells of the easterners moving in from Washington DC and the housing developments that will change the mountain forever. Its a sad ending to the farming life
January 21, 2024
This book was a Christmas gift from my parents: 12 books they thought I should read. When I read the title and opened the front cover to see Holland's signature, written out for my grandparents, I teared up. Holland is writing from one county over from where I grew up -- my county is in fact the place she views as less threatened by the changes she is monitoring, where people hew more closely to tradition and virtue.
I love my county, but it is precisely because I grew up there that I can say that although those callouts filled me with warmth (in a sort of self contradictory way), Barbara Holland is full of shit.
I was pre-disposed to liking this book. I love Virginia, I identify with it, the rolling hills and country life and independent streak and beauty of isolation and nature. But Barbara doesn't just love Virginia. She loves tradition. And she hates the people -- yes, the actual people, not the forces -- that she perceives to threaten "the ways things are done around here." In fact, I think what Holland does by creating two classes of people that she effectively others from each other is not just disdainful, but dangerous. By ignoring the complexity of the land she has adopted, by ignoring the economic and social forces that have caused the "rapacious" housing developments she speaks of, she has made her book effectively worthless and in fact demonstrates a dangerous ignorance and a love for stereotypes that she seems eager to spread.
I am so sad about development of the place I grew up. But this kind of book is not the right way to talk about it. This book is a product of its time -- 1997 / the 90s -- and should be left to go out of print and never be read again except perhaps by historians trying to understand the 90s ethos.
Shall we dig in? I will share choice quotes with minimal commentary and you can draw conclusions from there.
The book glamorizes outdated gender roles, and villainizes feminism and gender equality.
This was noticeable from the outset of the book and started before I really gained steam on collecting quotes, but here are a few.
Disregard for what's happening in the world is considered a virtue
Also, the beginning of the racist parts of the book:
Serbs killed Muslims; Muslims killed Serbs; Israelis and Palestinians killed each other, like Hutus and Tutsis; Haitians and Russians killed other Haitians and Russians, and closer to home, restless folk killed strangers to express their political views or simply try out a new gun.
Ah, so no Christians involved in these killings, eh BARBARA??? She then goes on to posit, an attempt at humor, why don't they eat each other because at least then the killing would be useful. What in the world!!!
However, the worst on this segment about how global news doesn't feel relevant to her anymore occurs here, to my mind:
What clinched it was the kid and the swimming pool. In the summer, in a city neighborhood, a kid with an assault gun was passing a community swimming pool full of other kids and opened fire. Some were killed and some were wounded. The reporter reported from in front of the pool, now mercifully drained. He said there was no apparent motive. It was just one of those things.
Abruptly, from several feet beyond my left ear, a voice spoke to me. I didn't recognize the voice, but it had an authoritative, aunt-like ring to it. "They're making it up, you know," she said. "They make it all up." And the invisible aunt-figure reached across my lap to the remote control.
I still buy a Sunday paper and read most of it, though some Sundays I never quite make it clear through to the front. It may be a tissue of lies. Even the newspapers might be making it up. They too have a living to earn.
CHILLING. Like Alex Jones and Sandy Hook but way earlier.
Characterization of safety in the city are weird; maybe less outdated when she wrote in the 90s but still extreme
Cleaning out the kitchen cupboard, I came across a can of mace left over from my city days and gazed on it with wondering eyes: Did I really set forth to visit friends with Mace in one pocket and a 20 dollar bribe in the other? Did I really call my host and hostess to report my safe arrival home? Check the window locks before I went to bed? What a waste of energy and spirit; what an awkward way to live, surrounded by people who wished to do me harm.
Probably it breeds reciprocal hostility, until even the meekest citizen knows the urge to harm something -- someone -- anything, in return.
In official places I felt naked and exposed when speaking face-to-face with people who should have been behind bulletproof glass...It seemed almost obscenely intimate the way money was passed directly from hand to hand instead of poked through slots...Shopping I felt strangely adrift not to be shadowed by security guards; nobody here thinks I want to steal their merchandise.
Holland has only the most generic shining things to say about the "virtuous" locals
The children of the natives here still maintain a curiously high level of general virtue. They don't crowd pedestrians off the sidewalk, they hold doors open for me, their cars and pickups pass by laying only the gentlest of country music onto the air. They never seem angry.
Here I have to mention how Holland goes into raptures on the next page talking about how the high school voted to pray en masse at graduation, and the evil school board wouldn't let them! But they did it anyway, har har har.
In a later section, Holland talks about urban morality and how city people feel the need to eat vegetables, get exercise, care about homeless people and Serbs (actual words) etc and how virtue is simpler in the country. I am tiring of writing up these shocking and horrible quotes, so I'm skipping that one. Not two paragraphs later after writing about how virtue is so simple in the country by contrast, she writes:
...And on Friday nights beer is drunk, and the beer drinker, having no choice, drives home; he knows this is dangerous, but he feels no more sinful than he feels when driving without a seatbelt, which he also does.
I have yet to pass a jogger on the roads, but sometimes, driving toward the civilized east, I slam on the brakes for a weekend bike rider. As I edge around him on a blind curve...I can see by his face that bike riding is a virtue where he comes from. He's even wearing special clothes for it, ludicrous and indecent by local standards....From my point of view he's more dangerous than the beer drinker and harder to avoid, since I can stay off the roads after midnight on Fridays, but who can compete with virtue?
Not only do I disagree about drinking and driving being the lesser of evils; I also think that this passage shows how much this book is about clarifying who the in-group vs the out-group is. Can we build and maintain community without being horrible to each other, and tearing down each others' choices? Without completely hating all change? Holland does have some good in this book, but it's so shadowed by all the things she thinks are bad which are improvements in life and society.
Complete mischaracterization about race relations, cast as part of the insane chapter about how the Civil War wasn't about slavery
This passage suggests that black people were equally slaves and slave owners, as if that made owning slaves ok? I am excerpting a long passage because it is so insanely messed up. What the actual f%@k:
....And our black neighbors, mostly small farmers and independent contractors like the rest of us, generally live in their own houses, some in the small old towns like Brownsville and St. Louis, founded by fee blacks before the War; some simply mixed in with the rest of us, after the southern custom. Some fo their ancestors were slaves; some owned slaves themselves.
In supermarket and in parking lot, blacks and whites touch each other freely, slap each other's shoulders over a joke...
When my mother was building this house, she was given the name of the best stonemason in the area. He was the great-grandson of a slave who'd been famous for his stonework and proudly rented out by his former owner...
Ah, well, I guess it's ok he was RENTED OUT if the OWNER was PROUD? I can't. I almost rage quit the book right here but I wanted to see what other insanity it had in store.
I want to add here that this book was written in the 90s, published in 1997. Holland is turning willfully ignorant eyes to the matter of race in order to paint her picture of the perfect virtuous white country people. In my hometown, which is mentioned in the book, Black people could not actually go to some of the town amenities (I think it was a bowling alley in those days, but when I grew up it was a roller blading place) until after 1988. The picture Holland paints in this book is a complete lie and utter trash. Dangerous trash.
Holland caps off the Civil War chapter by literally writing, direct quote, all of these in italics are:
If they want to secede again, they can count on me.
More normative statements about tradition and dress codes and what's right
Here only lawyers wear suits, and the only female suit I've seen was on a young woman headed toward the courthouse with a briefcase. It was a wonderful suit, black, short-skirted, perfectly tailored, matching her perfectly tailored hair. There was something shocking about her, though, and I wasn't the only person to stop on the sidewalk and stare; she couldn't have seemed more out of place if she'd been climbing down from a flying saucer, and it isn't nice to look shocking. Maybe next time she'll know to wear a calf-length print dress and reboks.
Writing up these quotes has lathered me into a rage again. It is one thing to live your life the way you want and to love it; it is another thing to judge and disdain others' choices, especially choices that don't affect you -- like how to dress. I think it's no accident that the "shocking" person here was a woman, implied to possibly be a lawyer. How dare a woman be a lawyer! And how dare she wear a suit! Shouldn't a nice girl wear something else, sweetie? Nevermind that a suit is a lawyer's appropriate dress code.
Fuck you, Barbara Holland, for peddling in judgment and chains of tradition.
I love my county, but it is precisely because I grew up there that I can say that although those callouts filled me with warmth (in a sort of self contradictory way), Barbara Holland is full of shit.
I was pre-disposed to liking this book. I love Virginia, I identify with it, the rolling hills and country life and independent streak and beauty of isolation and nature. But Barbara doesn't just love Virginia. She loves tradition. And she hates the people -- yes, the actual people, not the forces -- that she perceives to threaten "the ways things are done around here." In fact, I think what Holland does by creating two classes of people that she effectively others from each other is not just disdainful, but dangerous. By ignoring the complexity of the land she has adopted, by ignoring the economic and social forces that have caused the "rapacious" housing developments she speaks of, she has made her book effectively worthless and in fact demonstrates a dangerous ignorance and a love for stereotypes that she seems eager to spread.
I am so sad about development of the place I grew up. But this kind of book is not the right way to talk about it. This book is a product of its time -- 1997 / the 90s -- and should be left to go out of print and never be read again except perhaps by historians trying to understand the 90s ethos.
Shall we dig in? I will share choice quotes with minimal commentary and you can draw conclusions from there.
The book glamorizes outdated gender roles, and villainizes feminism and gender equality.
This was noticeable from the outset of the book and started before I really gained steam on collecting quotes, but here are a few.
Disregard for what's happening in the world is considered a virtue
Also, the beginning of the racist parts of the book:
Serbs killed Muslims; Muslims killed Serbs; Israelis and Palestinians killed each other, like Hutus and Tutsis; Haitians and Russians killed other Haitians and Russians, and closer to home, restless folk killed strangers to express their political views or simply try out a new gun.
Ah, so no Christians involved in these killings, eh BARBARA??? She then goes on to posit, an attempt at humor, why don't they eat each other because at least then the killing would be useful. What in the world!!!
However, the worst on this segment about how global news doesn't feel relevant to her anymore occurs here, to my mind:
What clinched it was the kid and the swimming pool. In the summer, in a city neighborhood, a kid with an assault gun was passing a community swimming pool full of other kids and opened fire. Some were killed and some were wounded. The reporter reported from in front of the pool, now mercifully drained. He said there was no apparent motive. It was just one of those things.
Abruptly, from several feet beyond my left ear, a voice spoke to me. I didn't recognize the voice, but it had an authoritative, aunt-like ring to it. "They're making it up, you know," she said. "They make it all up." And the invisible aunt-figure reached across my lap to the remote control.
I still buy a Sunday paper and read most of it, though some Sundays I never quite make it clear through to the front. It may be a tissue of lies. Even the newspapers might be making it up. They too have a living to earn.
CHILLING. Like Alex Jones and Sandy Hook but way earlier.
Characterization of safety in the city are weird; maybe less outdated when she wrote in the 90s but still extreme
Cleaning out the kitchen cupboard, I came across a can of mace left over from my city days and gazed on it with wondering eyes: Did I really set forth to visit friends with Mace in one pocket and a 20 dollar bribe in the other? Did I really call my host and hostess to report my safe arrival home? Check the window locks before I went to bed? What a waste of energy and spirit; what an awkward way to live, surrounded by people who wished to do me harm.
Probably it breeds reciprocal hostility, until even the meekest citizen knows the urge to harm something -- someone -- anything, in return.
In official places I felt naked and exposed when speaking face-to-face with people who should have been behind bulletproof glass...It seemed almost obscenely intimate the way money was passed directly from hand to hand instead of poked through slots...Shopping I felt strangely adrift not to be shadowed by security guards; nobody here thinks I want to steal their merchandise.
Holland has only the most generic shining things to say about the "virtuous" locals
The children of the natives here still maintain a curiously high level of general virtue. They don't crowd pedestrians off the sidewalk, they hold doors open for me, their cars and pickups pass by laying only the gentlest of country music onto the air. They never seem angry.
Here I have to mention how Holland goes into raptures on the next page talking about how the high school voted to pray en masse at graduation, and the evil school board wouldn't let them! But they did it anyway, har har har.
In a later section, Holland talks about urban morality and how city people feel the need to eat vegetables, get exercise, care about homeless people and Serbs (actual words) etc and how virtue is simpler in the country. I am tiring of writing up these shocking and horrible quotes, so I'm skipping that one. Not two paragraphs later after writing about how virtue is so simple in the country by contrast, she writes:
...And on Friday nights beer is drunk, and the beer drinker, having no choice, drives home; he knows this is dangerous, but he feels no more sinful than he feels when driving without a seatbelt, which he also does.
I have yet to pass a jogger on the roads, but sometimes, driving toward the civilized east, I slam on the brakes for a weekend bike rider. As I edge around him on a blind curve...I can see by his face that bike riding is a virtue where he comes from. He's even wearing special clothes for it, ludicrous and indecent by local standards....From my point of view he's more dangerous than the beer drinker and harder to avoid, since I can stay off the roads after midnight on Fridays, but who can compete with virtue?
Not only do I disagree about drinking and driving being the lesser of evils; I also think that this passage shows how much this book is about clarifying who the in-group vs the out-group is. Can we build and maintain community without being horrible to each other, and tearing down each others' choices? Without completely hating all change? Holland does have some good in this book, but it's so shadowed by all the things she thinks are bad which are improvements in life and society.
Complete mischaracterization about race relations, cast as part of the insane chapter about how the Civil War wasn't about slavery
This passage suggests that black people were equally slaves and slave owners, as if that made owning slaves ok? I am excerpting a long passage because it is so insanely messed up. What the actual f%@k:
....And our black neighbors, mostly small farmers and independent contractors like the rest of us, generally live in their own houses, some in the small old towns like Brownsville and St. Louis, founded by fee blacks before the War; some simply mixed in with the rest of us, after the southern custom. Some fo their ancestors were slaves; some owned slaves themselves.
In supermarket and in parking lot, blacks and whites touch each other freely, slap each other's shoulders over a joke...
When my mother was building this house, she was given the name of the best stonemason in the area. He was the great-grandson of a slave who'd been famous for his stonework and proudly rented out by his former owner...
Ah, well, I guess it's ok he was RENTED OUT if the OWNER was PROUD? I can't. I almost rage quit the book right here but I wanted to see what other insanity it had in store.
I want to add here that this book was written in the 90s, published in 1997. Holland is turning willfully ignorant eyes to the matter of race in order to paint her picture of the perfect virtuous white country people. In my hometown, which is mentioned in the book, Black people could not actually go to some of the town amenities (I think it was a bowling alley in those days, but when I grew up it was a roller blading place) until after 1988. The picture Holland paints in this book is a complete lie and utter trash. Dangerous trash.
Holland caps off the Civil War chapter by literally writing, direct quote, all of these in italics are:
If they want to secede again, they can count on me.
More normative statements about tradition and dress codes and what's right
Here only lawyers wear suits, and the only female suit I've seen was on a young woman headed toward the courthouse with a briefcase. It was a wonderful suit, black, short-skirted, perfectly tailored, matching her perfectly tailored hair. There was something shocking about her, though, and I wasn't the only person to stop on the sidewalk and stare; she couldn't have seemed more out of place if she'd been climbing down from a flying saucer, and it isn't nice to look shocking. Maybe next time she'll know to wear a calf-length print dress and reboks.
Writing up these quotes has lathered me into a rage again. It is one thing to live your life the way you want and to love it; it is another thing to judge and disdain others' choices, especially choices that don't affect you -- like how to dress. I think it's no accident that the "shocking" person here was a woman, implied to possibly be a lawyer. How dare a woman be a lawyer! And how dare she wear a suit! Shouldn't a nice girl wear something else, sweetie? Nevermind that a suit is a lawyer's appropriate dress code.
Fuck you, Barbara Holland, for peddling in judgment and chains of tradition.
October 12, 2011
I enjoyed this slice of Barbara Holland's life. It was interesting to read about her transition from the big city life to a very different life in the Blue Ridge mountains of Virginia. Perhaps part of the interest for me is because I'm originally from the very urban area of Northern Virginia, east of her area, and while I know the location, I knew nothing about the culture of that area. However, now living in Wisconsin, I'm much more aware of rural life styles and can get a feel for the people that she describes. The end of the book was a little sad since it seems that just when she is becoming comfortable with her new life, urbanism is creeping in and will create major changes for her once again.
August 8, 2017
I started this book with a serious misconception (thinking it was about Bingo Night at the Fire Hall!) which was my fault. Going ahead and continuing to read it after I realized it was autobiographical of the author moving from Philly to the mountains of VA, it was very repetitious, and never went into any part of any story in the book with any depth which left me feeling frustrated. I got to know NOONE except the author. And, where in the world was the Bingo Night at the Fire Hall -- I kept waiting and waiting for some humorous tidbits from such an event and got nothing -- that left me hanging -- there wasn't any Bingo Night in my copy of the book, thus the 2 rating.
April 1, 2015
Holland is a a former advertising agency employee who left her job and the big city to move to rural Virginia, where this book has its setting. She writes a cautionary tale of the encroachment of urban life on her rural cabin and its back-woodsy region, depicting the newcomers in very unflattering terms and putting the native residents in the most flattering light. It's a folksy tale about diners and bars and small-town America under assault by money-hungry developers. She belabors her point, but overall I enjoyed her take on a way of life worth preserving and fighting for.
November 21, 2008
Another quick fun book to read, Holland really tells a good story and has interesting people
to share experiences with you as you read.
Now that I finished the book I have to agree with her, too many small towns have been turned into mega-malled, rush rush people with no time to smell the roses or enjoy their country surroundings. The farmers are pushed out by higher taxes to pay for new developments needs. Really discouraging at times.
to share experiences with you as you read.
Now that I finished the book I have to agree with her, too many small towns have been turned into mega-malled, rush rush people with no time to smell the roses or enjoy their country surroundings. The farmers are pushed out by higher taxes to pay for new developments needs. Really discouraging at times.
June 23, 2010
I really liked this and the salt of the earth depiction of the town, life, etc. I liked her comparison between when she was living in the city and when she was living out in the country. Since this is about my county (although I must count myself among those that apparently have ruined the county) I loved hearing about it 15 years ago and how the "originals" view everything.
August 29, 2010
I liked this memoir about the growth of Loudoun County in the last few decades, especially since I live here. This is one of the books I've read this summer that has gotten me thinking about how much more we can do to buy local products and be more self-sufficient. Recommend it if you are interested in the history here. Not riveting, but good.
September 29, 2007
I truly wish every one would read this book and understand what is going on in small towns (mountain or plain) around the U.S. This is exactly how I feel about where I live. Ok, I am not snowed in and cut off in the winter but there are more than a few truths here.
July 19, 2008
I liked it. As a collection of essays, it was very enjoyable. It felt sad, I also regret the passing of a more simple "country of small farmers" as Jefferson would have called it.
But it wasn't stunning. I read it quick, and will probably forget it quicker.
But it wasn't stunning. I read it quick, and will probably forget it quicker.
March 3, 2015
I was expecting hilarious fish-out-of-water stories, and while there are certainly funny anecdotes about adjusting to small-town life, I found the author's story of discovering - and learning to love - a landscape (ecological and social) that was quickly vanishing to be quite sad.
May 29, 2012
Loved this book...she is so descriptive that I could visualize the people and things she was talking about. Her humor made me laugh out loud.
January 28, 2014
This book is about what is lost with the march of progress. Her subject is the suburbanization of a rural part of Virginia. The book stays with you.
April 22, 2014
Life on the mountain - wonderfully insightful.
September 11, 2021
It was both a pleasure and a privilege to have read this book. I was glad to get a first hand account of an antiquated and disappearing way of life. Holland does a wonderful job taking something as mundane as her everyday activities and making them poetic and interesting. This is a good piece of history, an entertaining first hand account.
I found the chapter covering the weather to be a little bit slow, but that is my only criticism. Fair warning, there are no anecdotes or individualized stories, this is literally someone explaining their typical schedule.
I found the chapter covering the weather to be a little bit slow, but that is my only criticism. Fair warning, there are no anecdotes or individualized stories, this is literally someone explaining their typical schedule.
December 28, 2022
I like this sort of book. One that talks about place, and our place in the landscape. How we change it, how it changes us, what it means.
I'm sure that her hillside is now covered with houses. And I'll bet the deer are still there...and the possums and coons. And they will be there when the people are gone, I hope.
I'm sure that her hillside is now covered with houses. And I'll bet the deer are still there...and the possums and coons. And they will be there when the people are gone, I hope.
September 1, 2019
A disappearing way of life. This will make you want to retreat to small town American if you can still find one. An endearing read.
June 14, 2021
A delightful read about rural life and people. A well written, humorous at points, personal account of the author's life and experiences in the remote northern Blue Ridge Mountains.
May 7, 2022
I enjoyed it, though I did skim through some of it.
March 23, 2009
The good parts were amazing. It sagged just a bit in a few places (or maybe it was me sagging) but overall just so well-written.
Displaying 1 - 23 of 23 reviews