Posted: August 11, 2011 at 8:04 pm
A Thin Slice of Brain
Book Review
Montana Politicians love talking about how their ancestors homesteaded here during frontier days. It provides great biographical color.
But it looks like the frontier days may have lasted much longer than I previously thought. A Montana legislator has just released an autobiography detailing his boyhood days on the Montana frontier–in the 1960s.
Tom Burnett, the right wing lunatic legislator from Bozeman who’s favorite activity is gay-bashing, has published his much awaited boyhood memoirs, entitled “A Thin Slice of Sky.”
In this bizarre, laughingly awful book, Burnett talks about his experience growing up in a “frontier family” on the “family homestead”. But the homestead was a house in the 1960s, in Bozeman.
“Like mica in granite,” Burnett says of the homestead, “it was part of us, and we were part of it”.
Like all frontier homesteaders, life was tough. His parents, he says, homesteaded in the Gallatin valley because
“like Indians following buffalo, we knew we had to go where a livelihood could be had.”
Burnett is a modern day Willa Cather.
“Frontier families have no access to symphonies, sonnets or galleries,” Burnett reminds us. “But the little creek on our property partly supplied the lack. It gave us music to the other-world of poetry, and the perpetually variable visual feast.”
Some of the stories he relates are a little creepy, like the one about his father breaking a hole in the ice in the river so Burnett and his eight siblings could take a bath. Of course, I suppose when a poor family has nine children, the children often end up bathing in the river.
But never mind that. Do you realize what this publication signifies? Tom Burnett is aiming at higher office. He’s taken a page from other politicians. Like Barack Obama, who, in preparation for a big move, published memoirs a few years before announcing his candidacy for president.
Burnett must have big ambitions. For this book is an ambitious literary work.
A Thin Slice of Sky
By Tom Burnett
Amazon e-books
$3.99
Apparently the title is Burnett’s metaphor for his own very narrow world view. I’ll be spenging my $3.99 elsewhere.
Wow! What a Thick Slice of Bullshit! This dude is goofy!
The 1960′s is the frontier west now??? Looks like the revisionist in him and other GOP cant relate to real history anymore!
Only true believers believe in the lives of saints and politicians. This guy is only less slick and polished than Obama but equally full if homespun shit.
Why would anyone be bathing in a frozen river in Bozeman in the 1960′s unless their parent enjoyed abusing his children? This sounds seriously weird.
You should read the sample of the book available on amazon.com
It is a riot-the language is so tortured, and he makes un-apt comparisons to New York with frequency. I got a good laugh from this.
Having grown up in Butte, MT during the 1960s, I can report that we had a local symphony, Community Concert Series, real movie theaters that ran the current shows (better than today, when we only get the “blockbusters”)and indoor flush toilets. I don’t know what Butcher Hollow fantasy this idiot grew up in.
Gawd, he’s also the worst writer I’ve read since correcting freshman comp themes written by Catholic school girl graduates.
Like sands through the hourglass, so are the days of our lives.
Okay, so he’s no Ivan Doig or Norman Maclean. But I will defend him this far. He has a ‘growing up in Montana’ story to tell. Most of us do. But, like the ‘FEMA offering to pay for the bridge’ yarn, the bullshit factor is overwhelming. Back in the bitter and cruel and bitterer January of ’73, out in the frontier wilderness of the Bitterroot valley, our homestead’s well done frozed right up. (The pump went bad.) So my Pa grabbed hisself a pickaxe and with one mighty swing opened up a big ole hole in the irrigation ditch. What an endless bounty a’ joy that ditch could be to us young critters. Pa looked at us, with that twinkle in ‘is eye, and said “There’s your runnin water, boys. Hop in. The water’s mighty fine.” I love my Pa to this day, and think on ‘im every time I see them frostbite scars.
Actually, it didn’t happen that way at all. We collected snow in canning pots and melted it on the wood stoves. Burnett’s dad was a school teacher, and even in the 3 room hut of a learnin’ establishment in the tiny town I grew up in, the school showers were available to farm kids or pretty much anyone else who had water difficulties in the winter. It isn’t Tom’s rustic tale that annoys me. It’s the expectation that the reader is stupid.
Their Roll Models http://tpmdc.talkingpointsmemo.com/2011/08/perry-palin-and-polls-the-gop-primarys-wild-weekend.php?ref=fpa
Even the ‘Bog’ Irish appreciate the classics and respected the great works and Nature both.