Reading a book like this is like trying to consume a banquet of innumerable courses. "The Grandmothers" is a book of stories, all true, all passed down as oral history or experienced directly during Glenway Wescott's boyhood. This is a book of vignettes, each vignette demanding attention and wrenching gut reaction. Overwhelming at times, dense with a particular brand of old-fashioned writing ornate, yet deceptively simple, it must be read slowly to be fully understood and savored. Almost every paragraph in this book is so dense with action and information it could easily be expanded into a novel. And in every paragraph, the reader is transported into an era of unrelenting labor and unforgiving illness, of breathtaking ignorance and blind social injustice. Survival was all there was, and this was the kind of life everyone lived. A note: this book was extensively quoted in Michael Lesy's "Wisconsin Death Trip," a first hand, harrowing account of life in rural Wisconsin at the turn of the last century, culled from newspaper clippings and documents. "Wisconsin Death Trip" in turn inspired Stewart O'Nan's "A Prayer for the Dying," another exceptional, bleak, truthful look at life in the "good" old days. I recommend these three books highly.