In this memoir set on the high plains of Texas, Pulitzer Prize winner Caldwell transforms into art what it is like to come of age in a particular time and place. Beginning in the 1950s in the wilds of the Texas Panhandle, she grew up surrounded by dust storms and cattle ranches and summer lightning, and took refuge from the vastness of the land and the ever-present wind by retreating into books. What she found there, from renegade women to men who lit out for the territory, turned out to offer a blueprint for her own future. Caldwell would become a writer, but first she would fall in love with a man who was every mother's nightmare, live through the Vietnam years, and defy the father she adored. This memoir of culture and history--of fathers and daughters, of two world wars and the passionate rebellions of the sixties--is also about the mythology of place and the evolution of a sensibility: how literature can shape and even anticipate a life.

Gail Caldwell is the chief book critic for The Boston Globe, where she has been a staff writer and critic since 1985. In 2001, she was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Distinguished Criticism. She is also an avid rower. Caldwell lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.