Kangaroo Rabbits and Galvanized Fences: The Views of a Guy Who Wants To Know, “What Are Pinewood Derby Cars Made Out of?"

These mini-essays, originally newspaper columns written for Shaw Media (The Geneva Sun and The Kane County Chronicle), describe a life of survival: surviving diapers, Pinewood Derby races, and middle school band concerts. Rick Holinger regularly throws his pseudonymous nuclear family under the bus because his children were too young to object, and his wife enjoyed the extra, though paltry, income. No one, however, sacrificed more than the author. Who else would expose his fatherly and husbandly incompetence by revealing in print the time he burned out the front lawn with First Apply Spring Fertilizer? Or wrinkling his wife’s favorite wrinkle-free pants by leaving them untended and cooling in the dryer for five days? Or forgetting to screw in their inboard-outboard’s drain plug before spring launch, thus owning a bathtub rather than boat?

It takes a pillage to raze a family. But Holinger survived. Barely. This book tells how.

David Hamilton, Editor Emeritus of The Iowa Review, writes: “Holinger is obviously a very alert writer, uses language well, has all sorts of inventive phrasing: “coercing a dyslexic to play Scrabble,” for a quick example. The pieces are wonderfully consistent, uniformly good. He has arresting turns of phrase and quotable sentences. The author’s self-effacing good humor is another plus. You wouldn’t listen to a braggart tell such stories; Holinger is closer to the reverse. His moments of victory tend to be inward, observed by us but not always by his family, to whom he can seem more a lucky bumbler. It would prove a fine Christmas gift for friends and neighbors, for people who, like me, share this scene more or less.”

Wayne Fields, Ph.D., Washington University American literature professor and Lynne Harvey Cooper Emeritus Chair in English claims, “The author finds insight as well as humor in the ‘ordinariness’ of his and our world. The whimsy both in observations and in point of view makes the pieces ‘original’ even as the matters they address are thoroughly familiar. Mr. Holinger’s voice and style are idiosyncratic even as his immediate subjects are conventional, and it is these qualities that provide the fun of his writing. He can be both self-deprecating and slyly wise in a highly attractive wayI greatly enjoyed it. The writing is first rate and the goal is amusement.”