Last Kid News:

During a meet & greet appearance at Prairie Pages Books in Sun Prairie, author David Benjamin sold a copy of Summer of ’68 to a woman, Karin, who remembers that summer. She also recalled the day when she was in seventh grade, 22 November 1963, that president John F. Kennedy was murdered in Dallas. The month of November 1963 is the span that serves as setting for Benjamin’s novel, They Shot Kennedy.

Both novels, preceded by Benjamin’s fictional biography, The Life and Times of the Last Kid Picked and Fat Vinny’s Forbidden Love focus in intimate detail on a brief moment in the past. Such stories are sometimes classified as “microhistory.” Two popular historians, Simon Winchester (Krakatoa) and the late Stephen Ambrose (Band of Brothers) are non-fiction masters of this form. Benjamin does microhistory mostly in fiction. It’s the sort of story that summons all but forgotten moments from the memories of readers like Karin.

Karin was at first hesitant to buy Summer of ’68. But the turmoil of that year, the deaths of the Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. and Robert F. Kennedy, the battle between Chicago police and anti-war protesters at the Democratic convention came back to her. She remembered how important that time was—to her and to history. By reading Benjamin’s, she could both re-live that summer and look back with a new perspective.

Benjamin calls the four books, beginning with The Last Kid Picked and finshing in Summer of ’68, his Coming of Age Quartet. Each is narrated in the first-person voice of a young man growing up and coming to terms with the world in mid-century America.

Benjamin also delves into microhistory, in a far different place and time—the first century A.D. in Palestine—in Witness to the Crucifixion. Many of the essays in Benjamin’s two anthologies, Almost Killed by a Train of Thought and Benjamin’s Mess, present glimpses into the distant past that illuminate the times and stir the memory of the reader.

Poet Stephen Bluestone has written, “An essay by Benjamin begins as a journey from a known place—a small town in the Upper Midwest, say, or Paris or Tokyo or Brooklyn—to a destination that is always surprising. At the same time Benjamin’s personal journey starts with a working-class childhood in Wisconsin and—no matter how far the author roams—seems always to circle back to that beginning, to view the world from that platform. No matter the subject—memoir, politics, culture—David Benjamin observes it all with the keen eye of an H. L. Mencken musing on the life around him.”