The author spent her early years in the now-gone Akron neighborhood of Goosetown around 1950, and attempts to reconstruct the people and places of that time. With the help of her beloved Uncle Paul and various archives, she comes to understand her past. Unfortunately, very little happened. Painstaking detail is lavished on minor events. True, a young cousin was tragically killed in an accident, and there's the mystery of where a grandfather disappeared for several years - but most of this left me cold. I felt bad for not caring, but reading this was like watching someone's endless vacation slides (and the book's not even that long). ( )

I'm sorry, but I just couldn't get interested in either the characters nor the town. I got halfway through the book and was just bored every page. I hate to give a bad review, but I can't say anything good about it. If there is some great improvement later in the book please let me know and I'll try to finish it. In the meantime I have too many good books sitting around just waiting to be read. ( )

This is an elegiac memoir cum urban history that explores a working class family and the neighborhood the author never knew. Told in the present tense as, in part, a series of adventures with her Uncle Paul, the author explores her past, truths about her family, and the truth that place is ever changing.

What I liked best about this slim volume was the tone, and the forthright acknowledgement of the writerliness of the task. Ms. Dyer is a presence in the story and on the page, constructing her story as much as she tells it. As a study of memory and the eternal presence of the past, the book is slight but evocative; as a family history, it’s a little thin. The author admits that she is not telling her whole story, she’s not telling everything about herself or the neighborhood or her family, but coming at the end of the book, I found that unsatisfying.

The writing is lovely, and the present tense works well for the narrative. The chapter exploring how an ending is reached, and how two stories can have the same ending, was particularly fine and gets closer to the real heart of the story: the unspoken stories about her grandfather and father’s alcoholism, and the family history of Alzheimer’s.

In the end, this is a pleasant, well-written book with moments and passages of fine writing and engrossing story-telling that keeps many secrets still hidden. I hope the author explores them in greater detail. Her self-awareness and clean style serve her subjects well. ( )

A search by the author for her roots and her early childhood. She goes looking with her eighty-nine year old uncle because he still remembers the old neighborhood and all the old landmarks. His memory is astounding. She doesn't remember her grandfather who disappeared for years and no one knew where he was and the only thing her uncle would say about him was that he was a 'rascal'. If you were born during this era you can relate to this book and the good ole days. ( )

This is the first book I've read by Joyce Dyer. I understand that her other three memoirs have led the way to this one. I don't know had I read one of the prequels whether I would have been interested in continuing the journal with Goosetown, but Goosetown does not inspire me to explore her other writing. It's a rather dark story which makes me sympathetic to the author, especially regarding the relationship with her parents, particularly her mother. But, it seemed incomplete to me, like a journal that needed something more to make it a "real book" appealing to a broader audience; those of us who don't know Akron or don't share similarities with the author's experience. I hope Ms Dyer can come to terms with the family she was raised with and move on. I think that hope was lacking in her narrative. Maybe one day she will be able to tell us how she overcame her challenges, I would like to read about that.

Joyce Dyer is searching for what she considers her "missing years," those first four or five years of life of which few people can salvage many reliable memories. Dyer does remember a few things about when she lived in Goosetown, an Akron neighborhood, but she wonders if her memories are more akin to the product of someone else's stories or of the few old photographs of herself in Goosetown settings she has studied. Now, along with her elderly uncle, Dyer is traveling the streets of her old neighborhood in search of buildings and street corners that might help her recover memories of a time and place she barely recalls.

"Goosetown: Reconstructing an Akron Neighborhood" is as much about Dyer's reconstruction of what she knows about her family as it is about reconstructing the old neighborhood. She finds, despite how little Goosetown now resembles the area she remembers, that the buildings, homes and other physical markers from her youth point her toward truths about herself and her family she never expected to learn. Goosetown may no longer exist, but what it can teach her about her family will change her forever.

Joyce Dyer, in effect, had two sets of parents. Joyce's mother reacted badly to her birth and was never able to fully accept, or fill, her role as mother to the little girl, and her father dealt with the problem largely by ignoring it and getting on with his own life. Luckily, Joyce's Aunt Ruth (her mother's sister) and Uncle Paul were there to give her the love and guidance she did not always get at home. Joyce spent as much time with Ruth and Paul as she spent with her own parents, and she became as much a sister to their son Paul as she was his cousin. She was also close to her young cousins Carol and Eddie, although Eddie was struck and killed on a Goosetown street when he was just five years old.

Now, all these years later, it is her 89-year-old Uncle Paul, a man who has outlived two wives and jokingly calls himself the "Mayor of Goosetown," who accompanies Dyer on her quest. Paul is there to answer her questions and to put what she learns about her Haberkost grandparents into its proper perspective. Some revelations are triggered by the neighborhood's geography; others come from her study of public records, family letters and diaries; and still others are mined from the memories of relatives. What she learns about her family's history of alcoholism, depression and its tendency to suffer from Early-Onset Alzheimer's explains to her much about the family skeletons she had never really understood.

Near the end of "Goosetown," Dyer hints about the skeletons still in her own closet and what remains to be said if she is ever to tell the whole truth - all the things she keeps inside at the risk of her own well-being. Perhaps what she has learned about Goosetown and her family will make it easier for her to reveal the rest of her story. I hope so.

Rated at: 4.0 ( )

The memoir Goosetown is an attempt by the author to reconstruct her first five years of life when she lived in a neighborhood of Akron, Ohio once called Goosetown. Since her memories are vague to non-exsistant, she uses drives through the old neighborhood with her uncle to stir them up. In the end the most compelling discoveries are of her quiet and distant grandparents.

The book follows the quest for the information rather than any chronology of the lives being uncovered. The result is a disjointed story that is difficult to get into. I was nearly half way through the book before I developed an empathy and interest in the characters. As that began to happen, I could see and feel the power of the story. It illustrates what families loose in secrets and the price they pay for them. ( )

I just finished reading Goosetown: Reconstructing an Akron Neighborhood. The book was very easy to read.

However, I was never really drawn into the book. I feel it is because the author is talking about her life and it's not in story form- it's more like chronological fact-telling. Maybe if I lived in Akron when she did or was a member of her family I would have enjoyed this novel more.

It was almost like someone telling you facts about their life and you really don't pay attention because it means nothing to you and you don't know the people they are talking about. You just politely nod your head.

I did enjoy the photopraphs throughout the book. ( )

I expected a history of an Akron neighborhood, complete with famous faces and exciting events. What I got instead was a family memoir with mysteries and events that were never discussed. The book begins slowly but introduces us to the author's Uncle Paul, known to his family as the Mayor of Goosetown. In trips through the area the author becomes aware of events in her family that Paul won't discuss and she makes an effort to ferrit out the truth. In some sense, she does.

A book of family life that most of us growing up in the 50's can relate to, this book is a springboard for discussion about what secrets do to a family and to descendents in those families. ( )

Dyer attempts to remember her old Akron neighborhood (Goosetown) where she spent her first five years. She has very few memories of her life there, but calls upon her Uncle Paul, the self-proclaimed "Mayor of Goosetown," to help her bring her foggy memories ino sharper focus. She learns a lot about her family during her quest, particularly her maternal Grandfather, of whom she has very few memories. I admire Dyer for tackling many dark and painful memories and writing about them honestly. Her stoic German family didn't discuss the past, they lived in the present and didn't analyze their experiences. Dyer's discovery of the details around her Grandfather's death and her mother's death and most of her aunt's and uncle's deaths force her to write more honestly and to be honest with herself. This isn't Bill Bryson's Thunderbolt Kid-type memoir, although the era was the same. Dyer looks back at the 50's more honestly and without the rose-colored glasses. This is a compelling read that I'd highly recommend. ( )

I really enjoyed this book on many levels. I requested it through the Early Reviewers because I grew up in a little town just outside Akron and was intrigued with a story about our nearest big city. We got the Akron Beacon Journal newspaper on Sundays, shopped at the Acme grocery store, enjoyed visiting Quaker Square, and my dad learned how to maneuver his way around a computer at the University of Akron. A little book, I read it in a day, but not only because it was short. I was drawn into the author's search for her first five years of life in a part of town that barely exists any more. As I read I couldn't help but think that her research style (stories from elderly relatives, county courthouse records, walking the old streets) would be the way I would attempt to write my own memoirs. I dream of watching those same years of my life through a lens and seeing what I and my world were like back then. Dyer's volume is beautifully written. I plan to seek out her other titles and be equally delighted. ( )

What a beautiful book! The author writes so eloquently and her prose drawd the reader in so completely that even if I wasn't familiar with the area, I'd feel as if I knew exactly where she was describing. Goosetown was the term used for a small part of Akron back "in the day." She describes driving her elderly uncle up and down Grant St, trying to remember it - her family moved from Goosetown when she was 5 or 6. I loved on Grant St, in the college apartments, for a short time, so I can picture a lot of what she describes.

In the end, though, the book is less about trying to remember the town itself, or even her early childhood, and more about finding out where one really comes from; the people we come come from, and their secrets.

I loved the book and am going to seek out the author's other books. ( )

As a person struggling to write memoir, I was intrigued by this book. The fact that I am of the same generation as the author helped, too. It starts out rather slowly but gathers momentum as she delves deeper into the story of her difficult grandfather. The best parts are those dealing with the various members of her family and how her interactions with them shaped her life.

The subtitle, "Reconstructing an Akron Neighborhood", makes it sound more like social history than personal memoir but she weaves them together in a cohesive way. As an aside, I've never been to Akron but her stories really sound like my husband's tales of growing up in South St. Louis.

I will be searching out her earlier books and look forward to reading them.

Perhaps there is no mystery quite so tantalizing and yet in the end so unsolvable as that of one's own identity; that nagging question that is always nibbling at the very edge of one's consciousness: Who am I?

Because although the subtitle of Goosetown, Joyce Dyer's slim third volume of memoirs, is Reconstructing an Akron Neighborhood, this is no straightforward sociological study and careful researching of an inner city area which has nearly disappeared. Not by any stretch of the imagination. What Dyer is really doing here is continuing what she began in those other two books. Like so many memoirists, she is simply still trying to figure out who she is. Trying to remember those first five years of her life may be an impossible task, but in the course of seeking out those years, she learns some dark secrets about her Haberkost grandparents, whose intermittent rages, long silences and disappearances she now understands as early signs and inklings of mental illness and probably hereditary dementia.

This is a book filled with mysteries - grandfathers and other relatives who drank, a mother who was distant, a loving aunt who filled that gap, an uncle who was perhaps a better father than her own. Family ghosts, skeletons and characters abound in Goosetown, making it a difficult book to put down. Indeed, I read it in just a couple of sittings in a single day.

While Dyer does fulfill the promise of her subtitle in providing a history and a good picture of the physical geography of what was Goosetown (now mostly gone), she dwells at much greater length on the inner geography of her own extended family. There is her stern and forbidding grandfather, August Haberkost; her cousin Eddie, killed by a car at five; her loving and maternal Aunt Ruth; and her cousins Paul and Carol. But most of all there is her Uncle Paul, twice widowed and the self-proclaimed "Mayor of Goosetown," now an octagenarian who assists her in her quest to find again the old vanished neighborhood, and also gently teaches her about more important things, like forgiveness, and knowing when to just let go of the past.
Dyer is, it seems to me, unflinchingly honest in this look at herself and her family. She was equally honest in her portrayal of her father in her previous memoir, Gum-Dipped: A Daughter Remembers Rubber Town. And yet she accuses herself of holding back certain things about herself in her writing. "I don't lie, exactly, but I keep things hidden." She hints at secrets she has yet to share, things she hasn't "the courage to talk about." But she knows the danger of this. "Words held inside can be as fatal as internal hemorrhaging," she writes. "I have no idea what damage my secrets have already done to me."

Because of comments like this, I suspect we have not heard the last from this exquisitely talented memoirist. I hope I'm right. Because Goosetown, her best book yet, continues to spin out that common thread that connects us all as imperfect, fallible human beings. There is a connection between writer and reader here that can only be found in writing of the very highest caliber. More, please, Ms. Dyer. ( )