KEEPERS OF THE MOON: A Southern Boyhood...

KEEPERS OF THE MOON: A Southern Boyhood by Tim McLaurin (Anchor: $10; 316 pp.). The author of “The Acorn Plan” describes growing up in North Carolina during the postwar years: cock- and pit-bull fights, epic drinking bouts and hangovers, deer hunts and fishing trips, high school sports and lust. McLaurin’s wins the reader’s affection through his honesty--he neither falsifies affection for his past nor elevates it to anything more admirable than it was. His prose displays the clean strength of a hand-whittled block of oak: “We are the sons and daughters of the land, our heritage tied to fields and wood, the call of the hunt, the spiritual transition of the seed that cracks the hard earth and grows into weed, food, flower, or tree.”