Rerun Era is a captivating, propulsive memoir about growing up in the
environmentally and economically devastated rural flatlands of Oklahoma,
the entwinement of personal memory and the memory of popular culture,
and a family thrown into trial by lost love and illness that found
common ground in the television. Told from the magnetic perspective of
Joanna Howard's past selves from the late '70s and early '80s, Rerun
Era circles the fascinating psyches of her part-Cherokee teamster
truck-driving father, her women's libber mother, and her skateboarder,
rodeo bull-riding teenage brother.
Illuminating to our rural American present, and the way popular culture
portrays the rural American past, Rerun Era perfectly captures the
irony of growing up in rural America in the midst of nationalistic
fantasies of small town local sheriffs and saloon girls, which
manifested the urban cowboy, wild west theme-parks, and The Beverly
Hillbillies. Written in stunning, lyric prose, Rerun Era gives
humanity, perspective, humor, and depth to an often invisible part of
this country, and firmly establishes Howard as an urgent and necessary
voice in American letters.
