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Ron Powers' hometown is Hannibal, Missouri, home of Mark Twain, and therefore birthplace of our image of boyhood itself. Powers returns to Hannibal to chronicle the horrific story of two killings, both committed by minors, and the trials that followed. Seamlessly weaving the narrative of the events in Hannibal with the national withering of the very concept of childhood, Powers exposes a fragmented adult society where children are left adrift, transforming isolation into violence.
From a Pulitzer Prize-winning author, Tom and Huck Don't Live Here Anymore is a powerful, disturbing, and eye-opening dispatch from the homefront that will take its place alongside the works of Antony Lucas, Robert Coles, and Tracy Kidder.
- Sales Rank: #1748788 in Books
- Published on: 2001-11-06
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: 10.14" h x 1.20" w x 6.02" l,
- Binding: Hardcover
- 336 pages
Amazon.com Review
This book is at once an engrossing story of murder in a small American town and a profound meditation on the meaning of childhood in modern America. Ron Powers, co-author of Flags of Our Fathers, returns to Hannibal, Missouri--the boyhood home of Mark Twain, and also where Powers grew up--after learning about two local teenage killers. The very notion of it shook him: "In addition to their human victims, small-town killings assault ... the myth of the hearth, the safe inner circle that protects a loving enclave against the cruelties of a barbarous world." He goes on to describe "a world of absent or dimly connected adults" and how adolescents fall into the grip of a deep meaninglessness and whose "daily movements might easily begin with a search for a better brand of cigarette and end with a shotgun murder." Most of Tom and Huck Don't Live Here Anymore is a tale of two true crimes, though it's also punctuated by autobiography and full of Twain references. Hard to put down because the writing is so good, the book is hard to forget because its message is so troubling. --John Miller
From Publishers Weekly
owers, Pulitzer-winning columnist and coauthor of Flags of Our Fathers, weaves together three eras of Hannibal, Mo.'s history Mark Twain's early 19th century, his own 1940s and '50s and the 1990s lives of two duos of teen killers to explore the dark side of young manhood in America. The story that triggers it all is absurdly mindless two teenaged boys casually kill a harmless old man they don't even know and it cries out for explanation. Powers wanders Hannibal talking to family members and friends, looking for clues and meaning. He finds himself reliving his own grim boyhood with his abusive Fuller Brush-man father, which harks back to Pap Finn and Huck's subsequent escape, and then forward to an eerily Twainish teen killer. Powers's account starts sociologically (he examines what's wrong with teen culture today, citing dark imagery in advertising, entertainment and marketing) and ends up completely personally (with his brother's suicide and his longing for his father's love). The result is disturbingly powerful, mainly because there are no answers here. Yet Powers writes with such moving detail of his own father's craziness his idiosyncrasies and violent tendencies that resulted in "casual" beatings that this violence begins to say something about love, or what happens when love isn't. Powers's storytelling style keeps such good control over the pacing, readers will know they're not headed for a disappointment at the ending. 16-page photo insert not seen by PW. (Oct.)Forecast: With a little media attention, this should do very well, especially in the wake of recent violent outbreaks in schools.
Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information, Inc.
From Booklist
Winner of a Pulitzer Prize for radio-TV criticism, Powers has authored or coauthored nearly a dozen books, including a well-received memoir, White Town Drowsing (1986), and (with James Bradley) the best-selling Flags of Our Fathers (2000). Tom and Huck brings Powers back to his (and Twain's) hometown, Hannibal, Missouri, on a melancholy journey. In late 1997, Powers learned of one shocking killing in Hannibal; six weeks later, he heard of another. Those charged with both crimes were teenagers. How could once-idyllic Hannibal produce teenagers capable of committing such horrifying crimes? Powers talks with victims, neighbors, the defendants' family members, and, ultimately, the defendants. He covers the trials, questioning the tactics of the prosecutor and the defense counsel. And he thinks again about the "wholesomeness" and "innocence" of the Hannibal Mark Twain lived in and wrote about, as well as the town where he grew up in the '50s. In the end, Powers is impressed by the continuity of Hannibal's present and past, fathers and sons. Mary Carroll
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
Most helpful customer reviews
15 of 15 people found the following review helpful.
If there were means to require reading for American adults
By A Customer
Hannibal, MO was a good place - a place Mark Twain would still want to write about and still call home. And Hannibal's crusade to retain its association with one of America's greatest authors continued even as its population pushed out and away from its 1926 civic monument to Huck Finn and Tom Sawyer, and it changed. The gewgaw attractions, souvenir shops and then Wal-Marts and Super Centers took their place as the source of the pulse of Hannibal's community. Another Hannibal writer and native, Ron Powers watched from his adopted state of Vermont. It was puzzling to Powers, but he watched from a distance.
Then one evening in November 1997 two teenagers cruised the Hannibal streets looking for something to do, not far from Powers own childhood home. Robie Wilson and William Hill drove up to a 61-year old jogger and "doored" him - pushed open the car's passing door into the jogger's face at 50 mph.
Six weeks later, another shock hit small town Hannibal when two more teenagers, Zach Wilson and Diane Myers, were arrested for the shotgun murder of Diane's sleeping grandfather, J.D. Poage.
Two crimes, two murders shattered the semblance of calm in Hannibal and sounded an alarm as far away as the mind of Pulitzer-winner Powers who feared he was seeing the collapse of something bigger, something far beyond the place they called "America's Home Town" in Missouri.
Powers left Vermont for Hannibal and undertook some frightening analysis of the forces that led to its violence and wrote Tom and Huck Don't Live Here Anymore: Childhood and Murder in the Heart of America.
"With the supplanting of local merchants by corporate retail colonies at century's end, place had lost most of its morally regenerative force in heartland American life. The distinctive textures and the nuances of country and town life had stopped growing more separate. They had largely reconverged: subsumed into a larger, encroaching culture dedicated to the leveling of distinctions, and the allegiances and exaltations that such distinctions fed. `Place'," Powers says, "had been supplanted by `venue.'"
Powers describes the accused murderers and their culture, their families, their friends and their disconnect from moral mooring. As he does so he writes his own biography and weaves in references to life on the banks of the mighty Mississippi and the shore of a society eroding from a vision we often pretend to be true.
Powers' imagery is unnerving, at times described in stunningly fluid style, at others burdened by the author's attempt to find absolution for his own relationship with his late brother, Jim.
Powers writes an indictment of an America that has broken faith with its children. Not surprisingly there are questions unanswered, but this account blends a tail of two killings (and subsequent trials of the lost boys who committed them) with Powers' memoir of growing up.
There are no answers to why children kill. Yet, symptoms of community disintegration and the loss of social connection plague the country (latchkey children with over-scheduled parents, members of families distancing themselves from one another, families distancing themselves from their community, commercial sprawl next to neglected neighborhoods and a withering civic consciousness seem to be everywhere), and the cost is clear.
Powers writes with a mastery of language that sends readers back again and again to the top of his paragraphs. Tom and Huck is a dark and sobering book, but Powers' love for his hometown is enviable. This book is about social change that comes faster than anyone would like and the resulting struggle we all undertake to protect ourselves and those around us from that change.
Tom and Huck will help you understand your past and your present. You will better understand what young members of our culture see while we are not looking. There are shadows, but there is light. If there were means to require reading for American adults, this book would be on the list.
4 of 4 people found the following review helpful.
"Home Town" horrors
By Stephen A. Haines
Ron Powers is concerned about the young people of the United States. He's not alone in that. His interest is immediate and rather local. He worries about the events in his home town of Hannibal, Missouri. Sorry, i should have typed "Home Town", since Powers accepts the assertion that his native city is the model for others in his country. "America's Home Town" implies a small municipality dominated by a white, middle-class, "God"-fearing, clean-living population. The images of such places dominated the media for generations. That image has been tarnished - in this case by the killings of two elderly men in Powers' birthplace. He went there to investigate what had happened. This book is the result of his journey.
With an expressive journalist's style, Powers depicts the demise of James Walker and J.D. Poage. The weapon that took the life of the latter was a shotgun. The first man was killed by - a car door. Both were "intentional" killings, although "premeditated" doesn't seem to apply. The distinction is important because Powers, in trying to delve into minds of the children who took those lives, understands the killings were nearly "mindless". They were events "of the moment" and Powers tries to explain the foundation of those moments. He is certain they could have been avoided. In order to learn whether there were any "decisive steps" in the lives of the four teen-agers who perpetrated the killings, Powers spends much time in Hannibal and the surrounding communities, interviewing victims' relations, the killers' parents and friends and attending the subsequent trials. What he learns is revealing - in many ways.
The growth of the US economy has resulted in severe dislocations in those traditional "values" associated with the "Home Town". Powers cites statistics of single-parent families or homes where both parents work. Sometimes the job is far from the outlying home, resulting in day-care centres running twelve to sixteen hours each day from six in the morning. These day-care centres are dismally underfunded and little considered even by parents. City governments are averse to providing resources to avoid the stigma of high taxes. Older children, past the traditional day-care age are at loose ends. Those unable to afford computers or video games lack even that electronic "baby-sitting" service. They are deserted to find their own way in uncaring communities. Without parenting, these children are left to their own devices for long periods. Drugs and sex are common escapes, as the children in this account demonstrate. Murder or mayhem become easily attempted ventures, as the story of these children illustrates vividly.
In following these children, interviewing their parents and the townsfolk, Powers has given us a stirring account of what the US has become. The murder of two men almost pales by comparison with the sequence of school shootings and other violent rampages that occurred in the same period. This being Hannibal, Powers can't avoid parallels with those two literary idols of small-town USA, Huck Finn and Tom Sawyer. Both were young rebels in their own way, but even Huck chafed under the constraints of a society he claimed to reject. The children of today's Hannibal not only have fewer restraints, but the society around them provides an environment in which life has little value or meaning. The author hasn't any panacea for curing this situation. The book's chief worth resides in its being read by every parent in the country. It's advisable you read it, whether you have children or not. [stephen a. haines - Ottawa, Canada]
3 of 3 people found the following review helpful.
Small Town Crimes Revisited
By ink & penner
Here's an easy-read look at today's society as mirrored by small-town life, current and past. Popular writer, Ron Powers, describes how he grew up happy in Hannibal, Missouri. He, too, recounts many of his personal advances in career and outlook there and beyond. At the same time, the author traces unsettling events surrounding two (more-recent) tragedies which traumatized the hometown and sent him back there for a detailed see-for-himself.
Painting it in calm pastel, he describes Hannibal-gone-by with its inviting street-level stores and friendly conversation, its new Tom and Huck statue, Twain's boyhood home, the over-the-Mississippi Mark Twain Bridge...as if readers were right there with him. Powers also contrasts, describing today's Visitor Hannibal, complete with auto-choked streets, strip malls, the fast-paced fast-food outlets, dinettes, apartments, condos and tourist caves.
He reports Hannibal's now a deteriorating small town with weathered buildings, broken-down family structures, closed up mom and pop shops, youth gangs and spreading crime. With Walmart and other big-box consumer magnets closing in, he takes understandable issue with their growing influence there. Add staggering crimes by four high-schoolers, and there`s a story to be told.
~But that's the book's challenge. What's the connect between two murders and an aging city? Unfortunately, it's never clear as author Powers over-spends his time detailing the two cases' legalities and their prime players. He goes heavy into the actual crimes, the courtroom drama, the verdict(s), the lawyers' slants, in-court statements, townspeople reaction, and predictable accounts the perpetrators' family and friends. He really needed to include obvious highlights of long-winded talks with the guilty parties?
Maybe great reading for student lawyers, in a less-than-compelling way, the "legal" overwhelms any sociology (opinion or otherwise) about deaths of two townspeople and a subsequent baffled spirit of "America's Home Town." Repeatedly, the author returns to the crime(s), the scenes, the perps, the labors of prison life for them. The "who," "what," "when," "how" are clear. More of the "why" would vastly improve the reading.
When Powers does tie in the unthinkable offenses and the decline of Hannibal, the book sails along flawlessly. ~But as we become encumbered by recurring recaps of courtroom goings-on and interviews with its lawyers, this edition goes flat. We might as well re-read protracted events in the O.J. court. Certainly, the murder trial(s) reveal little of why Hannibal is no longer the town it used to be...safe, serene, sensible. ~Or was it ever really that way? The author could have opined, but he didn't.
The author's all over the board. Powers flashes back and forth to his own youth, then here and there intertwines later biographic successes...yet he never fails to go back to even still more details of the teenaged culprits and even to the town streets where the killings happened. Maybe that's how reporters write whenever they have the opportunity. ~But it doesn't necessarily make for consistently smooth reading.
So, did crime help cause the town`s slowdown...or did the waning town help cause the crimes? The book is about Hannibal, yes, but the question's not unique -could be any other small town (or big city) in America, but Powers makes no justification why Hannibal is especially noteworthy
-other than that he once lived there. That's not reason enough.
Are we about consumerism or about community? Ron Powers had an opportunity to examine the link, but he chose to play reporter instead of opinionated guru about the changing lifestyles of his town and our culture. ~And, curiously, included is more than enough background on the author himself. Maybe it ought to be: "Tom, Huck...and Ron (the author) Don't Live Here Anymore."
The book covers plenty quickly, often becoming thin and patchy. There's little depth on Hannibal's town woes, the teen killers' motivations, or Ron Powers' private need to reveal his own history in these pages. Not a yawn, but (from its title) the book doesn't live up to the possibilities.
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